As they sat together, companionably watching a spot of telly, Angela and Felix glanced around the lounge. They saw the soft sofa, the wide window … and the beautiful Christmas tree standing proudly in the corner. It was wreathed in brightly coloured baubles and twinkling with fairy lights. In fact, Angela had put up not one, not two, but three trees in her home that year: a little one in the hallway, a big one in the front room and a fibre-optic version in the conservatory. As she and Felix watched the television, their gaze also took in two toy dolls representing Father and Mrs Christmas, who stood sentry below the screen, like soft-tummied soldiers. With such loving and lovely details in place all over the house, Angela’s home certainly looked festive and fun.
It was a total transformation – and not just from how it looked out of season. The year before, Angela hadn’t bothered with any decorations at all, feeling there was no point when it was only her who was there to see them. But, this year, everything was different. This year she was spending Christmas with somebody very special indeed: Felix the railway cat. And she’d wanted it to be nice for her. Felix, she knew, was worth going the extra mile for. After all, although Angela had arranged to see her family over the festive period, it was Felix who would be with her every day, Felix with whom she would wake up on Christmas morning. And, in all honesty, it was Felix who had helped to get her through the past, rather difficult year.
Yet Angela’s house wasn’t the only thing that had been transformed over the past twelve months. She too felt different: more positive about the future, brighter overall. She knew it was due to Felix. Angela had a lot to thank that little cat for.
An Austrian study, carried out in 2003, had once shown that having a cat in the house was the emotional equivalent of having a romantic partner – but Angela totally disagreed with that. It wasn’t equivalent at all. It was actually much, much better. And, with Felix by her side, it turned out to be the merriest Christmas that Angela had experienced in many a year.
20. New Year, New Felix
‘Nice one, Felix,’ said Mark Allan, Felix’s Facebook manager, in January 2018. He lowered his phone, on which he’d been taking pictures of the station cat, and gave her ears a rough stroke. She tipped her head up into his hand, acknowledging the compliment – although, really, she was so consistently fabulous in front of the camera that it didn’t need to be said …
Mark slipped his phone into his pocket with a heavy heart that morning, and returned to stroking Felix. He had only a few minutes before his train was due to arrive and he wanted to make the most of the time he had with her.
Felix didn’t know it, but it was the end of an era. Mark’s job had recently changed and would require him to work in London from now on. For the past three years, he and Felix had met every weekday morning; it was a daily appointment that Felix rarely missed. Her delicate ankles and wrists bore no trace of a timepiece but, even so, the TPE team knew they could set their watches by her – because Felix was always impeccably punctual for meeting Mark. Every day she would wait for him by ‘their’ bench. But from tomorrow onwards, she would be waiting in vain.
Mark didn’t have the words to say goodbye to her. The only upside for him was that most Fridays he would be back up north for work. His bosses had given him the option of working from home that day – but Mark had a sneaking suspicion that the prospect of meeting Felix meant he wouldn’t. He’d much rather come in to see her on his way to the Manchester office – so that’s exactly what he did. He enjoyed his time with Felix so much that he simply couldn’t go cold turkey, even if that was what everyone else was eating in those first few days of the new year.
Luckily for him, Felix did not seem to hold a grudge against him when his new job began and he failed to arrive to see her four days of the working week. She still waited for him on those Fridays when he caught the train from Huddersfield. Remarkably, on his birthday she even waited outside on the station steps for him before accompanying him inside, as though she knew it was a special day. (Perhaps she had a calendar as well as a watch secreted somewhere on her person.) Mark found that he really missed their daily interactions – but he also discovered that it made the shorter time they now shared together even more special. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all, and that was definitely what happened for Mark, who continued to run the Facebook page (with a little help from the station team) despite his change of job.
As well as cherishing his time with Felix more, he found that he noticed little details which might previously have escaped his notice, such as the change in Felix’s name tag. The team leaders’ phone number, which was engraved on the back in case Felix ever got lost, had recently changed, so team leader Jacqui had ordered a new tag for Queen Felix. Naturally, it had to be a glamorous design. Jacqui had opted for a gorgeous one: a silver circular tag with a pink glittery pawprint on the front, and Felix’s name, address (‘Platform 1’) and the new phone number engraved on the back.
Felix took to it straight away, showing it off in her modelling shoots with her trademark style. Watching her pose and posture, the pink glitter at her throat sparkling under the station lights, it was more like seeing a diva on a dancefloor, lit by rotating glitter balls. Mark made sure to capture every sensational step she made.
On those Friday visits to the station he also noticed that Felix’s famous cat flap on the concourse had changed. Unfortunately for Felix, it wasn’t exactly an upgrade due to her ever-increasing fame. The original cat flap, which had been decorated with her name and cartoon image, had recently been vandalised. One Saturday afternoon in the run-up to Christmas, an angry man had decided to boot the plastic partition panel and badly cracked it; luckily, Felix wasn’t around at the time. The team had taped it up and put in a request with maintenance man Dave Chin to repair it.
But, before Dave could get to it, half a dozen fare-dodgers got there first. A group of lads, rushing to get through the gateline without paying for their tickets, had decided to try to hurdle their way over Felix’s personal entrance to the station instead. But their collective weight, combined with the original damage, was too much for the structure to bear. It had since been replaced, but it was ‘only’ a standard cat flap, brown and drab in design, with no decoration and no name of the famous railway cat appearing anywhere on it.
Felix, however, took as much notice of the ‘substandard’ replacement as she had of the original – which is to say, none at all. She had never used it anyway – she would squeeze awkwardly round the gaps at its sides, rather than swinging through the saloon door in its centre – and she wasn’t about to start now. Still, the unused cat flap stood on the concourse as before, a not-so-secret sign that a railway cat lived here.
Truth be told, as 2018 began, such signs were needed more and more. It was perhaps Dave who first noticed the difference in Felix. As he didn’t come to Huddersfield every day, he was struck by how Felix had gradually changed her routine. Once upon a time, when he came to the station, Felix would be out and about, sitting comically in a watering can belonging to the Friends of Huddersfield Station, stalking pigeons on the platforms or simply taking a breather on one of the metal benches. She was seemingly never off the platforms, and clearly enjoyed the fresh air and all the adventures of the railway. Back in the day, Dave had found himself unable to undertake a new task at Huddersfield without Felix trotting over to see what he was up to. Her inquisitive green eyes would drink it all in as he hammered or plugged or screwed or banged and she was fascinated by everything he did – by everything anyone did.