Felix The Railway Cat

If the booking office was shut and Felix was forced into a tight corner, she still wouldn’t use the flap. People had seen her heading towards it but, at the last moment, choosing to squeeze round the edge of the frame that held the cat flap – for there was a slim gap between the frame edge and the wall, which she could just slink through – rather than going through the flap itself.

It was just the sort of behaviour her colleagues were coming to expect from Felix. Angie had noticed that she no longer drank the water regularly laid out for her in her bowl. Instead, she would jump up to the sink, where the tap would sometimes be dripping. Felix would carefully shuffle on her bottom to the very edge of the sink, gracefully thrust her head forward and stick out her tongue to catch the fresh water drops, as if tasting manna from heaven.

She was a bit of a fussy eater, too. Though sometimes she would wolf down her ‘Felix’ cat food hungrily, at other times she would merely lick the jelly from the chunks of meat, as though selecting the choicest morsels, and leave the rest.

Billy thought she was spoilt, especially with her brand-name cat food.

‘Oh, just go into town and get a tin of any old cat food,’ he used to tell Angie. ‘She’ll eat it, mark my words. When she’s hungry, she’ll eat it.’

There came a day when one of the other team members completed the food shop for Felix and indeed picked up a tin of any old cat food. It was a household brand name, so it was tasty, high-end stuff, but it was not the eponymous ‘Felix’ that Felix herself had always favoured.

That night, as usual, Felix wound her way through Angie’s legs and miaowed for her dinner. She had had a hectic day patrolling the station and was in need of nourishment. Angie scraped the new branded food into her bowl and set it down, to the musical accompaniment of Felix’s satisfied purrs that her demands for food were being met.

Then the purrs stopped abruptly. Felix’s nostrils and whiskers quivered as she inhaled the unfamiliar aroma of her dinner. She dropped her head and looked at it quizzically. She edged a little closer and gave a deep sniff, as though making absolutely sure. Then she sat back on her haunches haughtily and looked up at Angie with an imperious glare, as if to say, ‘What is this?’

Angie shrugged her shoulders. ‘Eat,’ she encouraged her. ‘It’s good.’

Felix bent down again to her supper dish and gave it one more sniff. Back up to a sitting position she came again, and once more gave a demanding ‘Miaow!’ But there was no other food available.

As soon as Felix understood that, she took off from her meal and made a disgruntled exit: a most dissatisfied customer. She left that unappetising new food in her dish, and did not go near it again.

Angie fretted to Billy about it, but he gave her short shrift.

‘She’s ruined, that cat,’ he said bluntly. ‘She’s spoilt. When she gets hungry enough, I promise you, she’ll eat anything. Ours do at home. Just leave her be and she’ll come round.’

But this was a battle of wills that Billy was not destined to win. He and Felix both dug their heels in, but Felix was adamant she would not break. She was Felix the station cat and she liked ‘Felix’ cat food – and she would eat nothing else. In the end, Angie ended up going out mid-shift to the shop on the corner and buying some ‘Felix’ for her to eat. Felix gobbled it up gratefully, glad the stand-off was over and all was right with the world again.

With such grand behaviour becoming infamous in and around Huddersfield station, what happened next was perhaps no surprise.

Felix was summoned to the theatre. Her star potential had been spotted – and she was about to take to the stage.

21. Curtain Up

Felix had already proved herself a consummate performer. When interacting with the team, she had soon learned that mastering some little tricks made it much more likely she would be able to elicit a treat or two from them. (For with the station cat’s weight now normal and a formal feeding regime in place under the direction of the team leaders, the rules about giving the occasional cat treat had been relaxed a little.)

So Felix had learned how to sit at a colleague’s desk and raise one white-tipped paw, Oliver-style, to ask, ‘Please, sir, can I have some more?’ She had also perfected the most starving-hungry, Puss-in-Boots look with her great, green eyes, which rendered admirers powerless to resist her pleas for just one more treat …

With food-laden customers present every day on the platforms, it hadn’t been long before Felix had started plying her trade with them, too. She’d developed a sixth sense for knowing when someone was about to eat. Even before the flapjack had been unwrapped or the sandwich taken from its packaging, she would be in position a short distance away but still within the person’s eyeline. Closer and closer she would creep. Her tail would wag charmingly. She’d lick her lips in anticipation. Surely, any moment now …