Felix The Railway Cat

So although the kitten was making great leaps forwards, she was still a vulnerable creature at heart: new to the world and still finding her way, working out what was a terror and what was a toy; who was a friend and who an enemy. As with all parents watching their children grow, the station team were both delighted and chilled by her growing independence. But Felix was a loyal little thing. Almost as if she knew they might be fretting, her explorations never lasted for any length of time, and she never wandered far from Platform 1. Every few hours, several times a shift, the team would spot her hanging out by the bike racks or leaping up onto the customer-service desk to put in her time on the frontline. She gave them no cause for concern.

But then came a day Angie would never forget. The day when she signed on for her shift and Billy had to take her to one side.

‘Now, I don’t want you to panic, Ang …’ the gruff team leader began.

These words, of course, were destined to set her heart hammering hard and fast within her chest.

‘I don’t want you to panic,’ he went on, ‘but we can’t find Felix.’

Angie looked at him blankly. So Billy said it again, more plainly, more worryingly, and in words that left no room for doubt.

‘Felix has gone.’

13. Missing

‘What do you mean, you can’t find Felix?’ Angie asked.

Billy ushered her into the team leaders’ office and sat her down in a chair.

‘She’s disappeared,’ he said gently. ‘She’s been gone all day. Nobody’s seen her.’

‘What do you mean?’ Angie said again, the panic rising in her voice. ‘She can’t have just gone. She must be somewhere!’

But as Billy told her the whole story, Angie realised, with a sinking feeling, that the kitten was well and truly lost.

It had been Dave Rooney who’d first raised the alarm. He’d been the team leader on duty on the early-morning shift, and he’d suddenly realised mid-morning that he hadn’t seen Felix since he’d clocked on. That was highly unusual.

‘Have you seen Felix?’ he casually asked the team, strolling through the station.

But they all said ‘no’.

Dave wasn’t too worried. He sauntered down to the bike racks, checked in the shower room in case she was sleeping on her fleecy black blanket, and ducked his head into the lost-property office, asking Angela Dunn if Felix had popped by that morning. But the little kitten was nowhere to be found.

Dave walked back up Platform 1, wracking his brains. Felix sometimes liked to hang around the King’s Head at the southern end of the station, the boozy little thing, attracted by the thick brambled bushes at the very edge of the station’s plot. Could she have gone into the bushes and got stuck, unable to fight her way out? He hurried down there, but he could neither see nor hear the kitten amid the dense, knotted briars.

It was time to call in reinforcements. He radioed Dave Chin, the TPE maintenance man, and asked him to pop by as soon as he could.

Dave Chin wasn’t based permanently at Huddersfield, but worked all over the railway network, doing whatever odds and sods needed doing, turning up whenever he was summoned, like a sort of railway fairy godfather. He worked at Dewsbury, Stalybridge, Leeds and Manchester as well, but was often at Huddersfield. The first time he’d met Felix, she was sitting in a watering can on Platform 1 with her head poking out of the top – and it had been a mutual case of love at first sight. From that moment on, whenever Dave Chin came to Huddersfield, he made it his first duty to visit Felix, and it turned out that he was the ultimate Felix charmer. Though she was an affectionate cat with many people, her relationship with Dave was something else. He would pick her up and she would roll over instantly on to her back and loll there in his arms, her head hanging off one side and her legs dangling down the other, so that he could rub her belly or tickle her front paws. He’d walk all around the station with her like that: Felix splayed out in his arms, so loved up and easy and she didn’t care who saw it.

‘Felix,’ Angie Hunte used to tut when she saw her, shaking her head in mock-shame, ‘you’re an absolute disgrace.’

So when Dave Rooney told Dave Chin that Felix was missing, the maintenance man wanted to do everything in his power to find her. The team leader relayed his concern that the kitten might have got trapped in the overgrown bushes, and Dave Chin clapped his hands together decisively and sprang into action.

‘Right,’ he said firmly, ‘let’s get that cleared.’

Dave was a down-to-earth, well-muscled man with a weathered face and copious blond hair. He put every one of those muscles to use that day as he cautiously chopped down all the overgrown bushes on the station, looking under every briar for a little black-and-white cat. But when he had finished there was still no sign of her.