Felix The Railway Cat

But as she opened the door to fetch the Dreamies, Felix made a beeline out of the room. Unusually, she wasn’t hanging around to receive her reward. Angie followed her out into the corridor and watched her go, nodding her head understandingly. She knew Felix hadn’t enjoyed that experience, yet she knew, too, that what the cat needed now was simply to be left alone – Felix would come round in her own time.

She bustled back into the office, really pleased that, at last, Felix had taken her medicine.

‘Well,’ she said complacently to her colleagues. ‘That wasn’t too bad, really, was it? Not too bad at all.’

‘Angie,’ said Dale, slowly.

‘What?’

‘Look down there.’

On the carpeted floor was a little white tablet. Felix had spat it out before she’d made a beeline for the door. And she knew exactly what she’d done so she’d legged it before they could try to make her take it again.

Angie shook her head, nevertheless feeling a grudging admiration for the cat’s antics. Obviously Felix’s recent experiences onstage at the Alhambra had stood her in good stead – for the performance she had just given was truly worthy of an Oscar.

But it left them with a problem: how could they get Felix to take her medicine?

In the end, it was Billy who provided the solution. It turned out that the medicine didn’t come only in tablets: you could get it in the form of drops, too, which you placed at the back of the cat’s neck and then the treatment worked just as well. So it was in Billy’s arms that Felix finally received the protection she needed. He held her steady in his rough, weathered hands, stroking her fur reassuringly as he picked up the bottle and administered the drugs.

‘There you go,’ he said gruffly to her. And Felix was very grateful that he had ensured she never had to take those tablets again.

It marked the start of a softening in the relationship between Billy and Felix. The two seemed to reach a kind of understanding. And in Felix’s occasional grumpiness towards people – which she displayed more and more often, the older she got – one could perhaps see something of the cantankerous nature of Billy: Mr Grumpy himself. The two were kindred spirits. At any rate, he didn’t complain quite so much when she came to his garden anymore.

However, the horticultural experts who lived in Huddersfield might well have argued that perhaps he had never really wanted her to stay away. For amid the lavender and the Shasta daisies, the orange montbretia and the blue geraniums that Billy had planted in his garden, there was also another plant: nepeta, commonly called ‘catmint’. It has silvery-grey leaves and spikes of purple flowers, and gardeners know that cats love to roll in its aromatic leaves.

Perhaps he had planted it there just for Felix.

23. The Battle for Huddersfield Station

‘Eh up, here she comes,’ said Dave Chin with a hearty chuckle, watching an exuberant Felix bounding along the platform towards him in December 2013. Beside him, Chrissie from the booking office was carrying a cardboard box that Felix recognised oh so well: it was full of the Christmas tree decorations. Every year, as soon as that box of decorations came out, Felix came out too. For it meant only one thing: game on. Party time. Let the merrymaking begin …

By now it was a well-established tradition that, every December, Felix ‘helped’ to decorate the Christmas tree that stood in the station concourse. Just as she had done as a kitten, she would dart up the bare trunk, right to the top, then sit there for ages, queen of all she surveyed. Just because she was now an older cat, it didn’t mean she had forgotten how to have fun: when she wanted to be, Felix was still just as playful as she had been when she’d first arrived at the station as a little kitten and had run riot over all and sundry. As the decorating commenced, she would determinedly wage war on the baubles and on the gold cardboard fairy that Dave and Chrissie tried to hang on the tall tree, playing football with the ornaments as she batted them across the ticket hall – to the great amusement of the watching customers. As soon as she saw Dave staggering about the station with the enormous Christmas tree in his arms, she was right there with him, and this year was no different.

Eventually, Felix shook the pine needles from her fur and left the twinkling tree behind. Time for a patrol outside.