Felix The Railway Cat

They stumbled down the station steps and passed the King’s Head pub on their way to the car park. Billy could see his silver people carrier looming into view and it had never looked so inviting. He couldn’t wait to slip into the seat, click his seatbelt into place and drive straight home to bed.

But a cat-shaped someone had other ideas.

As they rounded the corner and had full view of the car, they also saw that Felix was sitting proudly on the roof, having selected it specifically from all the motors on offer. She looked as pleased as punch at her brainwave to stop him leaving the station. Perhaps she’d taken her inspiration from her hostage-taking triumphs, when she would jump up on the suitcases of those customers with food, trying to keep them on the platform for as long as she possibly could. For Felix looked pretty comfortable on top of Billy’s car – it was obvious she was not planning on moving any time soon.

Billy shook his head in disbelief.

‘Come on, cat,’ he said. ‘I want to go home.’

But Felix didn’t budge.

‘Get off, please, Felix,’ he went on. ‘I’ve just done a twelve-hour shift. I want to go home, cat. I want to go home now.’

Felix merely lifted her beautiful head just a touch higher, and every sinew of her fluffy body said, ‘I’m not moving anywhere.’ She flicked her tail back and forth, wagging it with great pleasure at the success of her scheme. Looking levelly at Billy, her big green eyes unmistakeably said, ‘Gotcha.’

‘Please,’ he begged.

Angie, chuckling away and not at all sympathetic to Billy’s situation, quickly snapped a photo of the stand-off between the two. There was Billy, absolutely exhausted, pleading with the cat, and facing him was Felix, sat squarely on the roof of Billy’s car, refusing to shift an inch. Angie thought it so funny that she showed the image to Billy’s wife and the team; she captioned it: ‘Preventing the team leader from going home.’ It was a ruse that Felix would try over and over again – because her heart was really in it.

As far as Felix was concerned, Billy’s home was here – with her. And with her was where he should always be.

25. Meet the Boss

Billy’s garden was now complete in terms of planting and design – but as any gardener knows, a gardener’s work is never finished, so he was still doing regular maintenance of the little patch of land on quiet shifts and on his days off, occasionally with a fluffy black-and-white shadow at his feet.

However, Billy had recently had another bright idea about who could help him with the garden maintenance – and it wasn’t Felix! Instead, Billy had wondered if he could perhaps get some of the local community involved; he had a vision that maybe a group of young people he knew, who all had learning difficulties, might be able to join him in helping with the garden. They’d then have a patch of the station they could take pride in. They could enjoy seeing the plants grow and come to appreciate how their care of those plants created real beauty. Their involvement was a way off yet – there were lots of hoops to jump through first – but when Billy had a vision for something he kept plugging away at it, and he planned to be no less dog-with-bone with this concept than he had been with so many other projects he’d turned his mind to over the years.

The station – as the team knew well – was much the better for his input. Not only was his ‘Art Station’ project still running, after a successful two years of exhibiting local artists’ work on the concourse, but Billy also won an award in 2014 for his environmental innovation (his second in five years). Over time, he had transformed the station’s green credentials, putting in place a traffic-light system for switching off plugs (to cut down on unnecessary electricity use), installing water-saving gadgets in the public toilets and revolutionising the recycling processes. Even in the garden, he’d recently devised a rainwater-capture system to keep the garden green. When new ‘young un’ Chris Bamford joined the station in 2014 – he would be doing a bit of everything: the gateline, announcing and customer service on the platforms – he found Billy’s work impressive; and the man himself very funny, even though he was incredibly blunt and direct (some might even have said rude). Mr Grumpy was still in position, but despite his best efforts he seemed to be endearing himself to more and more people by the day.

Yet Billy, the relatively important team leader, wasn’t the colleague to whom Chris was introduced first when he joined the team. That honour, naturally enough, went to Felix. In fact, the very first thing his colleagues said to him on his first day – as they did to all new recruits – was, ‘Have you met Felix yet?’

‘No,’ Chris replied, intrigued. ‘Who’s Felix?’