A Street Cat Named Bob (11 page)

The street instinct was still apparent when it came to food as well. When I took him downstairs to do his toilet now, he made a beeline for the area at the back of the flats where the dustbins were kept. The large ‘wheelie bins’ were often left open and occasionally there were discarded black, plastic refuse sacks, that had been ripped open by urban foxes or stray dogs. Bob would always go and investigate them to see if there were any leftovers. On one occasion I’d caught him dragging a chicken drumstick that had somehow been overlooked by the other scavengers. Old habits die hard, I figured.

It was true, of course. Despite the fact I was feeding him on a regular basis, he still treated every meal as if it was going to be his last. At home in the flat, the moment I scooped some cat food into his bowl he would stick his face in it and start guzzling as if there was no tomorrow.

‘Slow down and enjoy your food, Bob,’ I’d tell him, but to no avail. Again, I figured he’d spent so long having to make the most of every eating opportunity that he hadn’t adapted to living in a place where he was guaranteed a square meal twice a day. I knew how that felt. I’d spent large chunks of my life living the same way. I couldn’t really blame him.

Bob and I had so much in common. Maybe that was why the bond had formed so fast - and was growing so deep.

The most irritating thing - literally - about him, however, was the fact that his fur had begun coating every corner of the flat.

It was perfectly natural, of course. Spring was here and he was getting rid of his winter coat. But he was starting to lose a hell of a lot of fur. To help the moulting process he was rubbing himself on anything and everything he could find in the flat. As a result he was covering it in a thick film of fur. It was a real pain.

It was a good sign that his coat - and the rest of his body - was returning to good health. He was still a bit scrawny, but there was no sign of his ribs as there had been when I’d first met him. His coat was naturally thin because of the environment he’d probably grown up in - the street. The medication had helped with his bald patches and the antibiotics had definitely done the trick in healing his old wound. That had almost disappeared now, in fact, if you didn’t know it was there you would never have noticed it.

All in all he looked in a lot better nick than he had done a month or so earlier.

I didn’t bathe him. Cats wash themselves, and he was a typical cat in that respect, regularly licking and washing himself. In fact, Bob was one of the most meticulous cats I’d ever seen. I’d watch him go through the ritual, methodically licking his paws. It fascinated me, especially the fact that it was linked so strongly to his ancient ancestors.

Bob’s distant relatives originated from hot climates and didn’t sweat, so licking themselves was their way of releasing saliva and cooling themselves down. It was also their version of the invisibility cloak.

Smell is bad for cats from a hunting point of view. Cats are stealth hunters and ambush their prey, so they have to be as unobtrusive as possible. Cat saliva contains a natural deodorant which is why they lick themselves a lot. It’s been proven by zoologists that cats that lick the smell off themselves survive longer and have more successful offspring. It’s also their way of hiding themselves from predators like large snakes, lizards and other larger carnivorous mammals.

Of course, the most important reason that Bob and his ancestors had always licked themselves was to establish and maintain good health. Cats effectively self-medicate. Licking cuts down the number of parasites, such as lice, mites and ticks that can potentially damage the cat. It also stops infection in any open wounds, as cats’ saliva also contains an antiseptic agent. As I watched him one day, it occurred to me that this might be why Bob was licking himself so regularly. He knew his body had been in a bad way. This was his way of helping the healing process.

The other funny habit he’d developed was watching television. I first noticed that he watched things on screens one day when I was playing around on a computer in the local library. I often popped in there on the way to Covent Garden or when I wasn’t busking. I’d taken Bob along for a walk. He had decided to sit on my lap and was staring at the screen with me. I noticed that as I was moving the mouse around he was trying to swat the cursor with his paw. So back at the flat, as an experiment one day, I’d just put the TV on and left the room to go and do something in the bedroom. I came back to find Bob ensconced on the sofa, watching.

I’d heard about cats watching TV from a friend whose cat loved
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. Whenever it heard that familiar music - Dah-Dah Dah Dah Dah-Dah Dah Dah - he’d come running into the room and jump on the sofa. I saw it happen a few times and it was hilarious. No joke.

Pretty soon, Bob had become a bit of a telly addict as well. If something caught his eye, then he suddenly was glued to the screen. I found it really funny watching him watching Channel Four racing. He really liked the horses. It wasn’t something I watched but I got a real kick from watching him sitting there fascinated by it.

Chapter 8

Making It Official

One Thursday morning, a few weeks after we had started our busking partnership in Covent Garden, I got up earlier than usual, made us both some breakfast and headed out of the door with Bob. Rather than heading for central London as usual, we got off the bus near Islington Green.

I’d made a decision. With him accompanying me almost every day on the streets now, I needed to do the responsible thing and get Bob microchipped.

Microchipping cats and dogs used to be a complicated business but now it’s simple. All it requires is a simple surgical procedure in which a vet injects a tiny chip into the cat’s neck. The chip contains a serial number, which is then logged against their owner’s details. That way if a stray cat is found people can scan the chip and find out where it belongs.

Given the life Bob and I led, I figured it was a good idea to get it done. If, God forbid, we ever got separated, we’d be able to find each other. If worse came to worst and something happened to me, at least the records would show that Bob wasn’t a completely feral street cat; he had once been in a loving home.

When I’d first begun researching the microchipping process in the library I had quickly come to the conclusion that I couldn’t afford it. Most vets were charging an extortionate sixty to eighty pounds to insert a chip. I just didn’t have that kind of money and, even if I did, I wouldn’t have paid that much on principle.

But then one day I got talking to the cat lady across the street.

‘You should go along to the Blue Cross van in Islington Green on a Thursday,’ she said. ‘They just charge for the cost of the chip. But make sure you get there early. There’s always a big queue.’

So I’d set off today nice and early to get to that morning’s clinic, which I knew ran from 10a.m. to noon.

As the cat lady had predicted, we discovered a lengthy queue when we got to Islington Green. A long line stretched down towards the big Waterstone’s bookshop. Luckily it was a bright, clear morning so it wasn’t a problem hanging around.

There was the usual collection you find in a situation like that; people with their cats in posh carriers, dogs trying to sniff each other and being a general nuisance. But it was quite sociable and it was certainly a smarter, more caring crowd than at the RSPCA where I’d first taken Bob to be checked out.

What was funny was that Bob was the only cat that wasn’t in a carrier, so he attracted a lot of attention - as usual. There were a couple of elderly ladies who were absolutely smitten and kept fussing over him.

After about an hour and a half queuing, Bob and I reached the front of the line where we were greeted by a young veterinary nurse with short bobbed hair.

‘How much will it cost to get him microchipped?’ I asked her.

‘It’s fifteen pounds,’ she replied.

It was pretty obvious from my appearance that I wasn’t exactly rolling in money. So she quickly added, ‘But you don’t have to pay it all up front. You can pay it off over a few weeks. Say two pounds a week, how’s that?’

‘Cool,’ I said, pleasantly surprised. ‘I can do that.’

She gave Bob a quick check, presumably to make sure he was in decent-enough health, which he was. He was looking a lot healthier these days, especially now that he had fully shed his winter coat. He was lean and really athletic.

She led us into the surgery where the vet was waiting. He was a young guy, in his late twenties, probably.

‘Morning,’ he said to me before turning to chat to the nurse. They had a quiet confab in the corner and then started preparing for the chipping procedure. I watched as they got the stuff together. The nurse got out some paperwork while the vet produced the syringe and needle to inject the chip. The size of it slightly took my breath away. It was a big old needle. But then I realised it had to be if it was going to insert the chip, which was the size of a large grain of rice. It had to be large enough to get into the animal’s skin.

Bob didn’t like the look of it at all, and I couldn’t really blame him. So the nurse and I got hold of him and tried to turn him away from the vet so that he couldn’t see what he was doing.

Bob wasn’t stupid, however, and knew something was up. He got quite agitated and tried to wriggle his way out of my grip. ‘You’ll be OK, mate,’ I said, stroking his tummy and hind legs, while the vet closed in.

When the needle penetrated, Bob let out a loud squeal. It cut through me like a knife and for a moment I thought I was going to start blubbing when he began shaking in pain.

But the shaking soon dissipated and he calmed down. I gave him a little treat from my rucksack then carefully scooped him up and headed back to the reception area.

‘Well done, mate,’ I said.

The nurse asked me to go through a couple of complicated-looking forms. Fortunately the information she wanted was pretty straightforward.

‘OK, we need to fill in your details so that they are on the database,’ she said. ‘We will need your name, address, age, phone number all that kind of stuff,’ she smiled.

It was only as I watched the nurse filling in the form that it struck me. Did this mean that I was officially Bob’s owner?

‘So, legally speaking, does that mean I am now registered as his owner?’ I asked the girl.

She just looked up from the paperwork and smiled. ‘Yes, is that OK?’ she said.

‘Yeah, that’s great,’ I said slightly taken aback. ‘Really great.’

By now Bob was settling down a little. I gave him a stroke on the front of the head. He was obviously still feeling the injection so I didn’t go near his neck, he’d have scratched my arm off.

‘Did you hear that, Bob?’ I said. ‘Looks like we’re officially a family.’

I’m sure I drew even more looks than usual as we walked through Islington afterwards. I must have been wearing a smile as wide as the Thames.

Having Bob with me had already made a difference to the way I was living my life. He’d made me clean up my act in more ways than one.

As well as giving me more routine and a sense of responsibility, he had also made me take a good look at myself. I didn’t like what I saw.

I wasn’t proud of the fact I was a recovering addict and I certainly wasn’t proud of the fact that I had to visit a clinic once a fortnight and collect medication from a pharmacy every day. So I made it a rule that, unless it was absolutely necessary, I wouldn’t take him with me on those trips. I know it may sound crazy, but I didn’t want him seeing that side of my past. That was something else he’d helped me with; I really did see it as my past. I saw my future as being clean, living a normal life. I just had to complete the long journey that led to that point.

There were still plenty of reminders of that past and of how far I had still to travel. A few days after I’d had him microchipped, I was rummaging around looking for the new Oyster card that had come through the post when I started emptying the contents of a cupboard in my bedroom.

There, at the back of the cupboard, under a pile of old newspapers and clothes, was a plastic Tupperware box. I recognised it immediately, although I hadn’t seen it for a while. It contained all the paraphernalia I had collected when I was doing heroin. There were syringes, needles, everything I had needed to feed my habit. It was like seeing a ghost. It brought back a lot of bad memories. I saw images of myself that I really had hoped to banish from my mind forever.