The World According to Bob: The further adventures of one man and his street-wise cat (17 page)

It was a few days later on a Thursday morning, that Rita and Lee, the co-ordinators at
The Big Issue
stall on Islington Green called me over.

‘Hey James, you and Bob are in the paper today,’ Rita said, producing a copy of the
Tribune
.

‘Are we?’ I asked.

Sure enough there was a half-page article on us written by Peter Gruner. The headline read:

TWO COOL CATS . . .

THE BIG ISSUE SELLER

AND A STRAY CALLED BOB.

The story began:

Not since the legendary Dick Whittington has a man and his cat become such unlikely celebrities on the streets of Islington.
The Big Issue
seller James Bowen and his docile ginger cat Bob, who go everywhere together, have been attracting comments since they first appeared outside Angel Tube station. The story of how they met – widely reported in blogs on the internet – is one of such extraordinary pathos that it seems only a matter of time before we get a Hollywood film.

I had to laugh out loud at some of the journalistic licence. Dick Whittington? Hollywood film? And I wasn’t terribly pleased with the way I looked in the photo, sporting that thick beard. But it was a lovely piece, I had to admit.

I popped into the newsagent and grabbed a few copies to take home. Bob saw me looking at the piece again on the bus that evening and did a kind of double take. It didn’t happen very often, but for a split second he had this slightly baffled expression on his face. It was as if he was saying: ‘No, it can’t be. Can it? Really?’

Plenty of people knew it was really us though. And the publicity was soon reaping dividends, if only small ones. I’d agreed to do the interview mainly because I thought it would be good for sales of my magazines. I thought that by raising my profile it might encourage a few more customers to stop and talk to me at Angel tube station. And it did. In the days that followed, more and more people started saying hello to us not only at Angel, but on the bus and on the street.

One morning I was taking Bob to do his business on Islington Green when a group of schoolchildren appeared in front of us. They could only have been about nine or ten-years-old and were in very smart, blue uniforms.

‘Look, it’s Bob,’ one of them, a little boy, said, pointing excitedly.

It was clear the rest of the class didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

‘Who’s Bob?’ a voice asked.

‘That cat there on that man’s shoulders. He’s famous. My mum says he looks like Garfield,’ the boy said.

I was touched that we were being recognised by young children but I wasn’t quite so sure I was happy about the comparison with the world’s best-known cartoon cat. Garfield was famous for being obese, obsessed with eating, lazy and slightly obnoxious. He also hated any form of exercise or hard work. Bob had always been in fine fettle, ate pretty sensibly and had the friendliest, most laid back attitude of any cat I’d ever come across. And no one could ever call him work-shy.

There were lots of similar encounters during the days after the piece was published, but the most significant came from someone I’d spoken to once before.

I’d already been approached one evening by an American lady who said she was a literary agent. Her name was Mary. She told me she lived nearby and had noticed Bob and I outside the tube station many times.

She’d asked me if I had considered writing a book about my life with Bob. I said I would think about it, but, truth be told, I hadn’t really taken her seriously. How could I? I was a recovering drug addict who was struggling to survive selling
The Big Issue
. I didn’t write a diary. I didn’t even write texts on my mobile phone. Yes, I loved to read and consumed all the books I could lay my hands on. But, as far as I could see, at least, writing a book was about as realistic as building myself a space rocket or running for Parliament. In other words, it was a complete and utter non-starter.

Fortunately, she’d persisted and we’d spoken again. She had anticipated my concerns and suggested that I meet a writer who was experienced at helping people tell their stories. She told me he was busy at the time, but that he would be free towards the end of the year and would come and see me. After the
Islington Tribune
piece she contacted me again to confirm that I was happy to meet him.

If he thought there was a book in Bob and me, he would spend time with me, getting me to tell my story then helping to shape it up and write it. She would then try and sell it to a publisher. Again, it sounded too far-fetched for words.

I didn’t hear anything for a while, but then, towards the end of November, I got a call from this writer guy. His name was Garry.

I agreed to meet him and he took me for a coffee in the Design Centre across the road from my pitch. We had Bob with us, so we had to sit outdoors in the biting cold. Bob was a better judge of character than me, so I made a point of going to the toilet and leaving them alone a couple of times. They got on famously, which I took to be a good omen.

I could tell he was trying to work out whether my story was suitable for a book and was as open as I felt was possible.

As far as I was concerned, I really didn’t want to have to go into the dark side of my life. But as we spoke, he said something that struck a chord. He could see that Bob and I were both broken souls. We’d come together when we were both at rock bottom. We’d helped mend each other’s lives.

‘That’s the story you have to tell,’ he told me.

I had never thought of it in those terms. Instinctively, I knew that Bob had been a hugely positive force in my life. I’d even seen me on a video on YouTube saying that he’d saved my life. I guessed that, to some extent, it was true. But I just couldn’t imagine that being a story that would interest anyone.

Even when I had seen Garry again for another, longer chat, it all seemed a bit of a pipe dream. There were so many ifs and maybes. If Garry and Mary were willing to work with me, maybe a publisher would be interested in releasing a book. I really couldn’t see all three of those things happening. The obstacles seemed too great. As the festive season and the end of the year loomed into view, I told myself there was more chance of Father Christmas being real. Bob and I had grown to love Christmas together. The first year we’d been together we’d spent it alone in the flat, sharing a couple of ready meals and watching TV. Given that I’d spent several of the past ten Christmases on my own, in a hostel or off my face on heroin, it had felt like the happiest holiday ever.

I’d missed the second one by travelling to Australia, but ever since then we’d been together.

During the run up to Christmas, we had, as usual, been given a host of presents, from scarves for Bob to gift certificates for both of us at shops like Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and H&M. There was no question about which was Bob’s favourite: an advent calendar filled with his favourite treats. He’d fallen in love with it instantly, naturally, and had quickly learned to make a fuss first thing in the morning when it was time to produce the latest snack on the countdown to Christmas.

We also got a fantastic Santa Paws outfit. Belle had made me one for our very first Christmas together but it had somehow got lost. This one had a snug red jacket and a very striking red hat for Bob to wear during the festive season. Passers-by at Angel were besotted by it.

When it came to Christmas Day itself Bob spent more time playing with the wrapping paper than the actual present itself. He rolled around on the carpet, nibbling at it. I left him to it and spent the afternoon watching television and playing video games. Belle popped round for a few hours. It felt like a real family Christmas to me.

It was a couple of weeks into the New Year when I got a phone call from Mary telling me that a major London publisher, Hodder and Stoughton, wanted to meet me – and Bob, of course.

A few days later, I went along to their offices in a rather grand tower block near Tottenham Court Road. At first, the security people weren’t going to let Bob into the building. They looked baffled when we said he was going to be the subject of a book. I could see their point. Hodder’s other authors included people like John Grisham and Gordon Ramsay. What on earth would they be doing publishing a book about a scruffy-looking bloke and his ginger tom cat?

Someone from the publishers came down to sort it out, however, and after that Bob and I were both made to feel very welcome. In fact Bob was treated like visiting royalty. He was given a little goodie bag with some little snacks and catnip toys and allowed to wander around the offices exploring. Wherever he went he was greeted like some kind of celebrity. People were snapping away on their phones and cooing over him. I knew he had star quality but I didn’t realise it was this potent.

I, on the other hand, had to sit in on a meeting in which a long line of people popped in to talk about their different specialities, from marketing and publicity to production and sales. There was all sorts of business talk about publishing dates and production schedules. They might as well have been talking Serbo-Croat or Mandarin. But the long and the short of it was that they had seen some of the material Garry and I had worked on and they wanted to publish a book based on it. Between them, they’d even come up with a title:
A Street Cat Named Bob
. Tennessee Williams may have been spinning in his grave, but I thought it was very clever.

Soon I was being asked to visit the literary agency where Mary worked over in Chelsea. Again, it was a very grand and slightly intimidating place. They were more used to welcoming Nobel and Booker prize winners so there were a few odd looks when people realised that a
Big Issue
seller and his cat had walked into their rarefied atmosphere. While Bob explored the offices, Mary ran me through the contract that I’d been offered by the publishers. She told me it was a good deal, especially given I was an ‘unknown author’. I placed my trust in her and signed all the paperwork.

Over the course of the last ten years I’d been more used to signing drug prescriptions and police release forms. It felt weird scrawling my name, but also, I had to confess, very, very exciting.

There were times when I woke up in the morning thinking it was all a figment of my imagination. This couldn’t really be happening. Not to me.

I didn’t want Garry coming round to my flat at that point. So I began meeting him once or twice a week in Islington. There were pros and cons to the arrangement. On the plus side, it meant that I could top up my money and spend a few hours working afterwards. But it also meant that I had Bob with me, which meant that finding somewhere to sit and talk was a challenge, especially when the weather was bad. The local cafés wouldn’t let a cat on the premises and there wasn’t a library nearby. So we had to find alternatives.

The first people to invite us in from the cold, ironically, were Waterstones, the bookshop on Islington Green. They knew me in there. I’d often pop in with Bob to look through the Science Fiction section. The manager there, Alan, was on duty and we asked him if he minded us working upstairs in a quiet corner. He not only said yes, he got a member of staff to organise two chairs for us in the history section. He even brought a couple of coffees in.

When the sun was out, we used a place on the Essex Road that had tables outside. I could smoke there as well, which was a bonus for me.