Eventually, darkness fell beyond the French windows. ‘We can chill out now, Felix,’ Jean announced. ‘Surely nobody else is going to come round now!’
In fact, they did have one more visitor after sunset, the final fan in a very busy day, but after they had left Jean felt it was safe to batten down the hatches and truly relax in her favourite pink dressing gown. Wanting to wash away the day first, she went upstairs to have a quick shower before changing. She went on to autopilot as she climbed the stairs, her brain already turning back to Llewellyn’s classic book and the convoluted lives of its characters. What is going to happen next? she wondered. Who will live and who will die? What secrets might be revealed next?
Not until she started to descend the stairs, wrapped up in her cosy pink dressing gown and with herself rather pink from the hot shower too, did Jean suddenly remember that she hadn’t closed the door. Oh no, she thought, her heart beginning to pound. Just what mischief will that cat have got up to now …?
First one step, then the next; slowly, she walked down her stairs. She imagined all manner of chaos – the glass vase knocked over, stolen food … Or might Felix have even hidden herself away upstairs somewhere, so that Jean would have to spend the rest of the night hunting for her? Felix was known to be a fan of hide-and-seek at the station and was really rather good at it. Oh dear God, Jean thought with increasing panic, what if I can’t find her …?
But as Jean rounded the corner of the stairs she saw there was no need to worry at all. Though the glass-paned door was wide open – just as she had left it – Felix sat in the exact same spot she would have done if it had been closed. It was as if there was an invisible line marked on the threshold of the living room and Felix had not crossed it. Knowing the rules – knowing that Jean had said she could not come upstairs – Felix had listened and obeyed.
Well, that was a turn-up for the books! Jean felt her heart melt to see her sitting there so obedient and mature. The rampaging kitten she had once nurtured – and chastised – at the station was long gone. It was almost as if Felix had sat and passed a test; in her knowledge of the rules and decision to abide by them, it really showed that she was out of her kitten phase and undeniably an adult.
There was something a little sad in that moment for Jean, to know that Felix’s childhood – even her adolescence – was now well and truly over. But mostly she just felt proud. ‘You clever cat, Felix,’ she told her warmly. ‘What a very good girl you are.’
There was a final twist in the tale. After an evening spent reading on the sofa, Jean gave a yawn and decided to retire to bed. She went round turning off the lights and locking up the house, ready to head upstairs and slip beneath her snow-white duvet.
She was very nearly done in her preparations; all she had left to do was to shut Felix in. At the living-room door, she paused for a second, looking down at the lovely little black-and-white cat. Felix had been following her around like a shadow, but as they’d reached the threshold she’d stopped patiently in the doorway, knowing that she could not pass.
Felix looked at Jean. She blinked those big green eyes and Jean felt something dislodge inside her. ‘I was so good earlier,’ those eyes seemed to say, so very persuasively. ‘Don’t you think I deserve a reward …?’
Jean wavered only one moment more. ‘Oh, come on then,’ she said indulgently. ‘Come on upstairs with me, Felix.’
The cat didn’t need telling twice. Formally given the green light, she shot up those stairs faster than Usain Bolt. And the station cat went to sleep that night not in a cat basket or on a cat blanket downstairs, but curled up with Jean in her cosy bed … atop the finest white linen money could buy.
She really was a very clever cat.
8. All Change
Come the new year, Felix the railway cat was back to work with a vengeance. On New Year’s Day 2017, she trotted along the platforms with an easy stride, knowing the station and its rhythms like the back of her paw. Here came the passenger services roaring into the station, making not a few hungover patrons clutch their heads and wince with pain. Here came the tum-tee-tum trundling noise of suitcases, as festive revellers retraced their steps and found themselves homeward bound after their Christmas holidays visiting far-flung family. Here came the customer-information point, with the lost-property office just across the way, where Felix was expecting to put in a shared shift with Angela Dunn.
But here Felix came unstuck. Although it was mid-morning, time enough for both serving hatches to be open, instead there was a blue blind pulled down across the customer-information point, while the stable door of the lost-property office was firmly shut. Deterred, Felix sat back on her haunches, her furrowed fluffy eyebrows indicating that she was pretty perplexed.
Unbeknownst to Felix, a wave of modernisation had swept across Huddersfield station that new year, just as the wintry weather was sweeping through the Yorkshire countryside beyond, and these familiar landmarks, some of Felix’s favourites, had been caught up in a raft of changes. Recently, it had been decided that a fully automated announcing system would be used at the station from 1 January 2017, so the announcer’s office – which had been attached to the customer-information point – was now closed. With no one working in the room beyond the window any more, the serving hatch immediately became redundant too because there was no one there to staff it. In time, the white sign that had once guided passengers into the lobby was taken down to avoid confusing people. Instead, a simple sign declaring ‘Bicycle Park’ pointed to the silver racks that at least, from Felix’s perspective, had not changed at all.
In lost property, too, the old system was discarded, and Angela went to work in the booking office. Physically, the lost items were now kept in the Hub, the array of offices above the station concourse, which meant they were behind a security-coded door and up two flights of stairs. For Felix and Angela, it was the end of an era.
That new year, Angela Dunn trudged into work with a very heavy heart. She had loved working full-time in the lost-property office, reuniting worried passengers with their treasured possessions. It was a shock to the system to be returning to shift work in the booking office and she was apprehensive about it.
Nor had it been a particularly happy festive season in the Dunn household. Back in 2015, Angela and her husband of thirty-one years had decided to call it a day, and Angela was still figuring out the brave and sometimes blighted world of being single and divorced in her fifties, after more than three decades as part of a pair. Though it had been a reasonably amicable split – she and her husband had not even argued once – it was nevertheless tough getting used to being on her own, especially at Christmas. This year, she hadn’t even bothered putting up any decorations. And whereas once upon a time she had catered for twelve for Christmas dinner, year in and year out, this year she’d served herself beans on toast. There just didn’t seem any point in it all, not when you were on your own.
The first week of 2017 – the first week of her new routine – was really hard-going for Angela, and for Felix too. But they found they helped each other through the changes. Almost as if Felix knew that Angela needed her, she would hang out on the platform or by the bike racks – even, sometimes, in the car park itself – waiting for her beloved colleague to arrive for work. It meant that Felix was the first colleague Angela saw every morning and it made her day. Felix would come over to say hello the moment she appeared, purring softly with pleasure. And then the two of them would walk together into the back office, where Angela would put her things in the ladies’ locker room, now ready to face a day of serving customers. Despite the hardness of her life changing, and the sometimes awful feeling of having to get up at 4 a.m. for her new shifts, she found she felt much brighter about it all than she’d ever hoped she might – and it was all due to Felix’s considerate attentions.