A Street Cat Named Bob

I just sat there shaking my head. This was surreal.

‘You were then led to the ticket booth and asked to buy a ticket,’ he went on. ‘When you did so, against your will, you then spat at the window of the ticket booth.’

That was it; I lost my cool.

‘Look, this is bullshit,’ I said. ‘I told you I wasn’t in the tube station last night. I’m never in there. And I never travel by tube. Me and my cat travel everywhere by bus.’

They just looked at me as if I was telling the biggest lies in the world.

They asked me if I wanted to make a statement, so I did, explaining that I’d been busking all night. I knew the CCTV footage would back this up. But at the back of my mind I was having all sorts of paranoid thoughts.

What if this was all a fit up? What if they had doctored the CCTV footage in the tube station? What if it went to court and it was my word against three or four London Underground officers?

Worst of all, I found myself anxiously wondering what would happen to Bob. Who would look after him? Would he stay with them or head back on to the street? And what would happen to him there? Thinking about it did my head in.

They kept me in for about another two or three hours. After a while I lost all track of time. There was no natural light in the room so I had no idea whether it was day or night outside. At one point a lady police officer came in, with a surly-looking male officer behind her.

‘I need to do a DNA test,’ she said as he took a position in the corner where he stood with his arms folded, glaring at me.

‘OK,’ I said, ignoring him. I figured I had nothing to lose. ‘What do I have to do?’ I asked the female officer.

‘Just sit there and I’ll take a swab of saliva from your mouth,’ she said.

She produced a little kit, with loads of swabs and test tubes.

Suddenly I felt like I was at the dentist.

‘Open wide,’ she said.

She then stuck a long, cotton bud into my mouth, gave it a bit of a scrape around the inside of my cheek and that was that.

‘All done,’ she said, putting the bud in a test tube and packing her stuff away.

Eventually, I was let out of the cell and taken back to the desk at the front of the station where I signed for my stuff. I had to sign a form saying that I was released on bail and told that I had to return a couple of days later.

‘When will I know if I am being formally charged?’ I asked the duty officer, suspecting that he couldn’t really tell me that. To my surprise he said that I’d probably know when I came back in a couple of days’ time.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘More than likely,’ he said.

That was good and bad, I decided immediately. Good in the sense that I’d not have to wait months to find out if I was going to be charged, bad in the sense that if they were going to charge me I could find myself spending time inside very soon.

I really didn’t relish that prospect.

After finally being let free, I emerged into the streets behind Warren Street in pitch darkness. There were already little groups of homeless people hunkering down for the night, hiding themselves away in alleyways.

It was approaching eleven o’clock. By the time I got back to Seven Sisters tube station it was close to midnight and the streets were full of drunks and people being turfed out of the pubs.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I got inside the flat.

Dylan was watching television with Bob curled up in his usual spot under the radiator. The minute I walked through the door, he jumped up and padded over to me, tilting his head to one side and looking up at me.

‘Hello, mate, you all right?’ I said, dropping to my knees and stroking him.

He immediately clambered up on to my knee and started rubbing against my face.

Dylan had headed off into the kitchen but soon reappeared with a cold tin of lager from the fridge.

‘That’s a life saver, thanks,’ I said, ripping the ring off the tin and taking a slug of cold beer.

I sat up for a couple of hours with Dylan, trying to make sense of what had happened to me. I knew the ticket collectors at Covent Garden tube didn’t like me - but I didn’t think they’d go so far as to try and frame me for a crime I didn’t commit.

‘There’s no way they can fix the DNA to match yours, mate,’ Dylan reassured me.

I wish I could have been so certain.

I slept fitfully that night. I’d been really shaken by the experience. No matter how much I tried to tell myself it would work out fine, I couldn’t erase the thought that my life could be about to take a terrible turn. I felt powerless, angry - and really scared.

I decided to give Covent Garden a wide berth the following day. Bob and I played around Neal Street and one or two other places towards Tottenham Court Road. But my heart wasn’t in it. I was too worried about what was going to happen when I turned up at the police station the following day. Again that night I struggled to get much sleep.