Felix The Railway Cat

He cleared his throat and repeated something he’d said to Gareth a few times already, when it was just the two of them in the office and they had some time alone. ‘Be aware, young Gareth,’ he warned him in his gruff voice, ‘you’re getting stuck here, son.’

He slipped outside with a cigarillo between his fingers and let the door slam shut behind him.

Gareth sighed, Billy’s words of warning rattling around in his head. The old-timer had told him, ‘You’ve got to move on. If you don’t move every three or four years, people will think you’ve given up, and they’ll never entertain giving you another job.’

Was he right? Gareth didn’t know. Like Billy, during his five years at the station he had seen plenty of colleagues become set in their ways but – funnily enough – for all his years of service, Billy wasn’t one of them. Though some long-service employees could become very black and white in their view of things, Billy could not only see shades of grey but also in technicolour – sometimes literally. He liked to open things up and try out new ideas, and one of his recent innovations was to transform part of the station concourse into an art gallery; a vision that would come to fruition the following spring. He was a pioneer when it came to the environment, too, and had already won an award for his novel ways of making the station run more greenly. Billy’s philosophy was that the station didn’t just have to be a terminus, it could be a hub of the community and the team could make it really nice.

Nor was he the only one at Huddersfield with those ideas – Andy Croughan had started a library where people could leave and take books for free; later, the concourse would display local poetry and get involved in creative writing projects. It was part of what made Huddersfield so special and why Gareth loved working there so much – it wasn’t a big, impersonal station as some of the major hubs could be, but neither was it a quiet little place off the beaten track where people had given up. No, Huddersfield was a place where people made things happen.

And he was among those people, Gareth realised suddenly. He glanced down at Felix, who glowered at him from within her big white cone. He had made the station cat happen. It had given him a little bit of faith in himself. Maybe Billy is right, he thought. Maybe I should keep an eye out, see if anything comes up.

In the meantime, he had a poorly kitten to care for – and he wasn’t the only one on duty. Everyone passing through the office had a kind word – and more – for Felix on her sick bed. Poor thing, she really was very distressed. She took to wandering the office with her favourite brown bear clutched in her mouth, just walking up and down, mewing.

‘What’s up with you? Do you want to go out?’ Angie Hunte would ask her, as Felix cried plaintively. But the cat would just pick up the bear and go back to her slow, sad meandering. Both Angie and Angela thought she treated it like her baby; perhaps, they mused, it was Felix’s way of mothering now that she herself would never have her own kittens.

In the light of Felix’s fretfulness, lots of the team – independently of one another – took to giving her comfort as often as they could. As Felix turned her big green eyes on first one colleague and then another, the colleague favoured with her gaze would crouch down and slip a hand into their pocket, or their handbag or their desk drawer, from where they would retrieve a bag of treats that they had brought for her. They’d shake one out into their palm and Felix would stick out her little pink tongue and snatch it up, gratefully, as if she hadn’t been fed for a week.

‘Miaow!’ she’d say, plaintively, blinking those big green eyes.

‘OK, one more,’ the colleague would say, and another treat, or two, or three, would go the same way as the first, as Felix perfected the art of the pitiful stare.

Knowing no better, some colleagues even gave the recuperating kitten saucers of milk, thinking it would cheer her. Of course, she absolutely loved it, lapping it up eagerly and flicking tasty white droplets onto her velvety black nose.

As Felix’s post-op health gradually improved and she started going outside again, Angie discovered she was stumbling over her in the most unlikely places.

‘Why are you sitting there, Felix?’ she would ask in confusion.