Some weeks before Christmas, Jean had one of her casts removed. Relishing the ability to bend her fingers after so long without freedom of movement, she made sure to give Felix a chin tickle in her radiator bed on her next visit to the station. Felix purred like a train engine, so happy to have Jean back in this way. And, as she pressed her fingers into Felix’s soft fur, Jean rather felt like purring herself.
But while Felix was much more tolerant of fans than before, she still needed her downtime. There were still occasions when the staff had to apologise and inform hopeful visitors that their queen was indisposed. It meant that when Eva – the little girl with big pink glasses, who was no longer wearing a starry blue coat, as she’d grown out of that last year – came calling for Felix that December, she was again left disappointed. Felix was not available for visitors that day.
Eva pushed her spectacles up her little button nose and sighed deeply. She and her mummy, Helen, had tried several times to visit Felix over the past year, scouring the station for any sign of her, but all their attempts to see her had ended in failure. For Eva, who still drew Felix at her kitchen table, who still thought of Felix as one of her very best friends, it was a bitter disappointment that was really hard to bear. Her big blue eyes would fill with tears and it was all Helen could do to get her to leave the station; Eva wanted to wait there for as long as it took for Felix to reappear. But after half an hour or so of tears and deep sadness, the bubbly four-year-old Eva would emerge again – and always with an irrepressible message of hope. ‘Next time it might happen, Mummy! When can we try again?’
Eva had this deep conviction that it was just a matter of time before she would meet Felix. She was always asking to go back to the station to look again. ‘One day, we will see her,’ she told her mother over and over again.
This day, 9 December 2017, was not to be the chosen date, but there was a new development in Eva’s quest to find Felix. Previously, she and Helen had been somewhat limited in their searches, asking only the platform staff for help. On this occasion, they had happened to be at the booking office, buying tickets to Stalybridge for a family day out, so Helen had asked at the counter if Felix was free.
Well, she wasn’t – but what was this the lady was bringing back for them? To Eva’s delight, the TPE team member pressed a free Felix postcard and pen into her hands.
Just as Angela Dunn had envisaged in the summer, the gifts went a long way towards making up for Eva missing out on meeting Felix. The little girl stared down at the beautiful image of Felix with dumbfounded joy. Across the bottom of the postcard was written ‘Have a purrfect day!’
‘Mummy, look!’ Eva cried in excitement. She was absolutely made up. ‘I am going to take it into school for show-and-tell!’ Then a new idea struck her. ‘Mummy, I am going to put this in my bedroom in a frame! Have you got a frame I can borrow please, Mummy? I want to do it as soon as we get home!’
And that was exactly what they did. Helen gave her daughter a brilliant white picture frame that beautifully set off Felix’s ebony fur. That same evening, the framed postcard took pride of place on Eva’s windowsill in her pretty pink bedroom. She placed it next to a framed photograph of her beloved grandad, who had passed away earlier that year.
He and Eva had been very close; he had used to call her ‘Grandad’s girl’. They’d spent hours doing jigsaws together, Eva squinting through her glasses, trying hard to see the missing pieces, despite the fabric patch over her good eye, while Peter smoothed her blonde hair back from her forehead and watched her with loving concern. It had been her grandad who’d been the first family member to spot her failing sight, the first to try to get her help. Perhaps, in some ways, it was a blessing that he wasn’t around to know that Eva’s sight wasn’t getting better at all – in fact, it was getting worse.
But, for the time being at least, Eva could still see her grandad in that framed photograph on her windowsill. It was one of the last-ever photos of Eva and her grandad taken before he died, of them riding the dodgems on a family holiday in Malta, so it was very precious indeed.
That night, as Eva snuggled down to sleep underneath her bedspread – which was printed with the smiling features of a cartoon cat – she glanced between the snapshot of her grandad and the new framed postcard of her very best friend in the world. And she decided to begin a new nightly routine.
‘Goodnight, Grandad,’ she whispered to the image of the smiling man. Eva touched his face gently, and then flicked both her eyes, the good and the bad, back to the fluffy black-and-white cat. She grinned suddenly, so happy to be able to say it to her face. ‘Goodnight, Felix.’
18. Perfect Partners
It was the morning after the night before at Huddersfield station, the morning after the staff Christmas party, which had been held in a local Italian restaurant. There had been food and drink, and revelations … for Dan and Sara, at last, had come clean about their office romance, having kept it under wraps since it had started (they had told no one apart from Felix). They hadn’t wanted anyone else to know till their relationship was on a firmer footing, and even then they’d wanted Andy Croughan to be the first to find out, just in case there were any problems with two employees getting together.
Dan had had a few drinks before he broached the topic with his boss. It was one of those situations where he was really asking for forgiveness more than permission. ‘By the way, this is happening, and I hope it’s OK because, well, it’s already happened …’
But Andy was absolutely fine with it. ‘I’m happy for you,’ he said to Dan. ‘Just don’t do owt daft on shift.’
In truth, it had been fairly obvious to the station manager for quite some time now that there was a spark between the two team members – and who was he to stand in the way of true love?
True love was what one creature certainly had in mind at the station that December – but, sadly for him, his affection was very much not reciprocated. His name was Charlie and he was the loveliest, friendliest and soppiest cocker spaniel in the whole wide world. Though perhaps not according to Felix the cat.
One late evening that December, Charlie and his human, Julie Swift, were coming home from Sheffield University, where Julie had been lecturing her students in dog grooming and Charlie had been a model ‘model’ dog. He was such a happy-go-lucky fellow that he had patiently allowed every student in the class to have a go at hand-stripping him, a grooming technique whereby they used their fingers and thumbs to pluck the dead undercoat from his fur. Under Julie’s direction, the students had excelled at their work and Charlie’s glorious golden coat now had a lovely silky sheen to it that was shining brightly under the station lights.
Julie walked along with her fake-fur-trimmed winter coat buttoned up against the cold. She was a short, dark-haired lady in her mid-forties, who described herself as a mad dog groomer with an even madder dog. Charlie, true to form, was enjoying his evening stroll as they disembarked from the Sheffield service on platform two and began walking up platform one towards the station exit. He trotted along on a blue patterned lead that was attached to his blue diamanté collar, his nose sniff-sniff-sniffing at the cold winter air.