Felix The Railway Cat

‘Let’s get you introduced to her,’ they told him, smiling. And they made sure those introductions were complete before they commenced any of the induction formalities. They had their priorities right: ‘Meet the Boss, and then we’ll deal with the station.’

In truth, in Felix’s three years at Huddersfield she had confidently assumed a supervisory role over every department, so perhaps it was only fair that Chris should meet the colleague who would be keeping a very close eye on his performance. When Felix wanted to be, she was immensely curious about every aspect of the station team’s work – and had the attention span to sit and watch everything she possibly could. As she did so, she seemed to take a step back from the colleague she was observing, as though she was about to scribble thoughtful and perceptive notes on a (very well concealed) clipboard.

It was like having an inspector in. She would sit for a long time watching the booking-office team serving at the windows, appraising their performance. She would balance on top of the monitors or the printers, and keep tabs as the tickets came out. When the cashing up was being done or the Securicor man was dropping off more money, Felix would be there, keeping a close eye on the cash: the multi-talented, multi-disciplined supervisor extraordinaire.

Chris laughed when he realised just who ‘Felix’ was. A friend of a friend of his had worked at Huddersfield station just before he’d joined, so he had heard on the grapevine that there was a resident cat at his new workplace – but he hadn’t known her name. Now, he did.

As it happened, Chris was allergic to cats. But it wasn’t as if he could do much about that! And, as he settled into the station, over time Felix seemed to help him build up his tolerance until he was absolutely fine in her presence.

That first week, however, he was perhaps apprehensive about working with her in more ways than one. For as Chris learned the ropes, just as his colleagues had warned him, ‘the Boss’ was on his tail. On one of his very first shifts, Felix joined him on the gateline. Yet she hardly set a good example: she sat squarely in the stream of customers coming through the gates so that they had to move around her. Worse still, she just glared, Medusa-like, at every single customer coming through.

Her grumpiness had become more pronounced as she grew older, and Chris was seeing it in action today. There were some people she liked – such as the Felix charmer, Dave Chin, into whose arms she would still leap for an upside-down cuddle – but many others whom she didn’t. If she didn’t know someone, she was likely to regard them with deep suspicion until they had proved themselves trustworthy.

Given this reputation, perhaps Chris gulped as this temperamental terror headed straight towards him, insolently swishing her fluffy black tail. Felix had evidently decided to assume a new gateline position. She suddenly (and rather unexpectedly) sat down firmly on Chris’s money bag, which he’d momentarily left out on the side while he got himself sorted.

Chris needed that money bag in order to serve his customers. But now, with an adult cat sitting heavily upon it, he couldn’t get to his cash.

‘Uh, Felix?’ he asked, feeling somewhat self-conscious to be talking to a cat. ‘Could you, er, move, please?’

Felix stared at him stonily and yawned her most bored and uninterested yawn. Chris rubbed his hands over his black-bearded face and sighed, thinking hard. It seemed like the worst kind of initiation ritual imaginable for one’s first week in a new job: a deliberately difficult boss who seemed set on sabotage. He’d expected there to be lots of skills he’d need to acquire to become adept at his new role – he hadn’t expected one of them to be mastering the art of removing a cat from a money bag.

But he did it, in the end, and in time he began to learn other things, too, including how to shift Felix without waking her if she was spread-eagled across the keyboard in the announcer’s office when he needed to use it. The desk had always been a favourite location for a catnap, but she took up rather too much room now.

Despite Chris’s growing skill in handling her, Felix, mischievously, seemed set on making the new boy’s life difficult. She would plonk her bottom on the microphone button, stopping him from making an announcement – and as she did it, she would gaze at him with a twinkle in her big green eyes, as though she knew exactly what she was doing. Or she might paw at his arm to demand his attention just at the time he needed to focus on a CCTV image, or even when he was midway through broadcasting an announcement over the tannoy. He would somehow manage to finish what he was saying without making an error, then turn to Felix.

‘What do you want, cat?’ he would ask.

And she’d flick that fluffy tail of hers, as though to say, ‘Wouldn’t you like to know.’