The World According to Bob

I wasn’t that disconnected from reality. I knew there were millions of people in the same situation as me, every single one of them with better qualifications. I was so far down the pecking order in the jobs market I felt that it wasn’t even worth applying for jobs.

My dad wasn’t a man to bare his emotions with me. I knew he was frustrated by the way I lived my life. Deep down I knew he felt I wasn’t trying. I understood why he felt that way, but the truth was that I was trying. Just in my own way.

To lighten things up a little we talked a little bit about his family. I wasn’t particularly close to Anthony and Caroline; we met very infrequently. He asked me what I was doing for Christmas — I’d spent a couple of Christmases with him but it hadn’t really been a barrel of laughs for either of us.

‘I’m just going to spend it with Bob,’ I said. ‘We enjoy being together.’

My dad didn’t really get my relationship with Bob. Tonight, as usual, he stroked him occasionally and kept an eye on him when I popped to the toilet. He even got the waitress to bring him a saucer of milk and gave him a couple of snacks. But he wasn’t a natural cat lover. And on the one or two occasions when I had talked about how much Bob helped me in sorting myself out he just looked baffled. I suppose I couldn’t blame him for that.

As usual, my Dad asked after ‘my health’ which I always took to be code for ‘are you still off the drugs?’

‘I’m doing all right,’ I said. ‘I saw a guy drop dead from an overdose on the landing of my flats a while back. That freaked me out quite a lot.’

He looked horrified. He had no understanding of drug culture or the way it worked and, like a lot of men of his generation, was a little bit scared of it truth be told. For that reason, I don’t think he’d ever really grasped how bad my situation had been when I’d been at my lowest ebb on heroin.

He’d seen me during that period, but, like all addicts, I had learned to keep that side of my life hidden when necessary. I’d met him a couple of times when I was off my face on gear. I’d just told him I had a bout of the flu and assumed he wouldn’t know any different. He wasn’t stupid though, he probably sensed something was wrong but wouldn’t have been able to put his finger on what it was specifically. He had no concept of what it was like to do drugs. I quite envied him that.

We spent an hour and a half together, but then he had to catch a train back to south London. He gave me a few quid to tide me over and we agreed to see each other again in a few weeks’ time.

‘Look after yourself, Jamie,’ he said.

The station was still busy. It was the back end of the rush hour. I had a few magazines left in my satchel so decided to try and shift them before heading home. I found an empty pitch outside the railway station and was soon doing pretty well.

Bob had a full stomach and was on good form. People were stopping and making a fuss. I was just weighing up whether to spend the money I was making on a takeaway curry when trouble reared its head again.

I knew the pair were trouble the moment I set eyes on them heading across the road towards the main entrance to Victoria Station. I recognised one of them from my days selling The Big Issue in Covent Garden. He was a wiry, grey-haired guy in his mid-forties. He was wearing the distinctive, red tabard but I knew he wasn’t a legitimate seller. He had been ‘de-badged’ a long time ago for various misdemeanours. His mate wasn’t familiar, but I didn’t need to know him to be able to tell he was a rough character. He was a big brute and was built like a sack of potatoes.

I immediately worked out what they were doing. The smaller one was waving a single copy of The Big Issue around, stopping people, collecting money but never handing over the magazine. They were running a scam called One Booking, in which vendors used a single, out-of-date magazine to generate a string of sales. Each time someone handed over some money, the seller would come out with some sob story about it being their last copy and being in particularly dire straits. It was begging, basically. There was no other word for it.

I was always amazed that anyone fell for it. But there were always a few gullible — or maybe generous — souls around.

I was worried that they were heading in our direction. Sure enough, they were soon outside the tube station entrance, with the smaller of the pair approaching travellers on the edge of the steps. It was blindingly obvious he wasn’t an official seller. The tabard was ripped to shreds and looked like it had been pulled out of a dustbin. It was also missing the official badge that legitimate vendors wore on the left hand side of their vests.

As his mate went about his business, the bigger of the two made a bee-line for me. He was every bit as aggressive as he looked.

‘Oi, you, get lost, or I’ll kill that cat of yours,’ he said, sticking his big red face close to mine. There was a trace of Irish in his accent and his breath stank of booze.