The World According to Bob: The further adventures of one man and his street-wise cat (24 page)

I was horrified. My head was spinning. Who had complained? And what had they said I was doing to Bob? I felt physically sick for a moment, but knew I had to keep my wits about me in case this got serious.

‘I’m sure they are unfounded allegations. I was actually watching you for a little while before I came over and I can see that you treat Bob well,’ she said, giving him a little tickle under the chin. ‘But I do need to have a chat with you and then examine him to make sure there’s nothing wrong if that’s OK.’

‘Be my guest,’ I said, knowing that I didn’t really have a choice.

She dropped her rucksack to the floor, got out a notebook and a couple of instruments and kneeled down to start examining Bob.

He didn’t always take kindly to people poking and prodding him. He had reacted to a couple of vets over the years and had snarled and scratched at one nurse who had handled him a bit roughly once. So I was a bit concerned about how he’d react to this latest stranger, especially if he picked up on my nervousness. That was all I needed, I thought to myself.

It wasn’t the first time people had accused me of mistreating him, of course. I’d heard all sorts of accusations levelled against me. The complaints generally fell into three categories. The first was that I was exploiting and ‘using’ him for my own benefit. My answer to that argument was always the same. As someone once said, a cat will be your friend, but it will never be your slave. A cat is never, ever going to do something it doesn’t want to do. And it is never going to be with someone it doesn’t want to be with, no matter what that person does to it. Bob was a very strong character, with a free will of his own. He wouldn’t have hung around if he didn’t trust and like me. And it was his choice whether he wanted to come out with me each day.

There were still days when he didn’t fancy taking to the streets. They were rare, to be honest. He genuinely enjoyed being out and about, meeting people and being fussed over. But when he hid away or refused to follow me out the door I always respected his decision. There would always be those who wouldn’t believe that, of course, but it was the truth.

The second common accusation was that I was mistreating him by having him on a lead. If I’d had a pound for every time I’d heard someone say ‘oh, you shouldn’t have him on a leash, he’s a cat not a dog’ I’d have been a very rich man. I’d explained the reasoning so many times I was bored at hearing myself say the words. On both occasions he’d run off, at Piccadilly Circus and in Islington, he’d been really relieved and clingy when I’d found him. I’d sworn never to let it happen again. But, again, I could keep saying it until I was blue in the face as far as some people were concerned. For them it was an open and shut case: I was some kind of animal abusing monster.

The third, and most upsetting allegation that had been made against me was that I was drugging Bob. I’d only heard that a couple of times, thankfully. But it cut me to the quick both times. Given what I’d been through in the past ten years and the battle I’d fought to kick my heroin habit, I found that the most hurtful insult of all. I found it really, really offensive.

As I watched the Inspector checking Bob I felt pretty certain that someone had raised one, two or even all three of these issues with the RSPCA. But I knew she wasn’t going to tell me, not until she’d completed her examination and written some kind of report, at least.

She took out a microchip reading device to check that he was micro-chipped, which he was, of course. The device showed up my name and address as Bob’s legal owner.

‘That’s a good start,’ she smiled. ‘You’d be surprised how many cat owners don’t chip their pets, even these days.’

She then checked his fur for fleas, took a look at his teeth and checked his breath, I assumed to see if there was anything wrong with his liver or maybe his kidneys. She also checked his eyes to see if they were cloudy. That made me wonder whether someone had tried to accuse me of drugging him. It made my blood boil to think someone would say that to the RSPCA.

I didn’t bother busking while all this was going on. Instead I reassured the small scrum of people who had stopped that everything was OK. I just hoped it was.

As I paced around I tried to put all those thoughts to the back of my head. I had to be positive, I told myself. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

After a few minutes she’d finished the inspection and started asking me questions.

‘Any health problems that you are aware of, James?’ she asked me, her pen poised over her notebook.

‘No,’ I said. I made sure to tell her that I regularly took him to the weekly drop-in Blue Cross clinic in Islington. They had always praised me for the way I looked after him and always gave him a clean bill of health. ‘They’ve not spotted anything so I think he’s pretty healthy,’ I told her.

‘That’s good to know, James,’ she said. ‘So tell me, how did you two get together in the first place?’

I told her the story and she nodded and smiled throughout.

‘Sounds like you two were meant to be together,’ she laughed.

She seemed pretty happy with everything, in fact she looked up and gave me a smile.

‘He’s a fine fellow, isn’t he? Don’t suppose you have a phone number that I can reach you on,’ she asked.

My battered old Nokia was still working – just – so I gave her the number.

‘OK, well I’m happy for now but I may need to follow up with another visit. Are you here every day?’

‘Yeah, pretty much most days at the moment,’ I said, already feeling uneasy.

‘OK, I will give you a call or drop in to see you soon.’

She then gave Bob a final ruffle and headed off into the crowds.

On the one hand I was pleased that she had left without any major drama. All sorts of scenarios had been going through my head. What if she’d found something that I didn’t know about, health wise? What if she’d said she needed to take him away? That was the worst conceivable outcome as far as I was concerned. I would have been sick with worry.

But my relief was tempered by other worries.

I knew the RSPCA had significant powers when it came to pet owners, from being able to confiscate a pet, to starting legal proceedings against anyone deemed to be guilty of abusing an animal. Why was she doing a follow-up visit? What was she going to tell her superiors? What sort of report was she going to write? What if I was prosecuted and, heaven forbid, Bob was taken away from me? I couldn’t help all these things going through my head, however little control I had over the situation.

I gave myself a good talking to. I was being paranoid again. That wasn’t going to happen. There was no reason for it. I had to put those thoughts to one side.

As I headed home that evening, however, I still had a knot of anxiety in my stomach. I had an awful feeling that this was going to hang over me for a while.

It was about a week later when the RSPCA inspector appeared again. She was a lot friendlier and more relaxed this time. Bob responded well to her as well as she once more knelt down to check him out.

I felt a bit more confident this time so engaged her in conversation.

Again, she made some notes and asked me a couple of questions about what we’d been up to that week and what we had planned in the coming days.

She sat and watched us interacting together and with the passers-by. RSPCA inspectors are obviously trained to read animal behaviours and she could see that he was perfectly content to be there and to be doing his little stunts for his audience.

She then headed off again and said she’d be in touch very soon. As she left, she gave Bob another friendly stroke, shook my hand and smiled.

I carried on for an hour or so, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was about to pack up when I saw a familiar face striding over. It was the housing manager of one of the blocks of flats on Neal Street. We’d clashed before, over my busking, which she objected to for some reason. She had a face like thunder. She had obviously been watching from a window and had seen the RSPCA officer shaking my hand and walking off.

‘People are trying to sleep upstairs,’ she said.

‘It’s two o’clock in the afternoon,’ I said, genuinely baffled.

‘Never mind that,’ she said as if I was some three-year-old child. ‘You shouldn’t be busking here. Can’t you read the sign?’, she said, pointing at a plaque across the road on the side of the building where she worked.

‘But I’m not busking there, I’m busking on the other side of the road,’ I said. ‘And I am entitled to do that if I want. The outreach workers and even the Police have told me as much.’

Again, she wasn’t interested in having a debate about it. She just wanted to rant and rave at me.

‘I’ve had enough of you and that bloody cat, I’m going to call the police and have you removed,’ she said, marching off. She seemed even angrier than when she’d arrived.

Her argument was actually ridiculous. How on earth could I disturb people from their sleep in the middle of the afternoon? I didn’t have an amplifier, so it wasn’t as if I was blasting out a huge amount of sound. And besides, this was a busy street with a lot of traffic passing through at all hours of the day and night. If anything was going to wake up her residents, it was the constant din of delivery vans and lorries and police sirens. It was crazy.

Despite all this, however, I knew that she did have the law on her side to an extent. There were restrictions on busking in the area and I had to be very careful. So I kept an eagle eye out for the police for the rest of the afternoon.

Sure enough, about half an hour after I’d had the confrontation with the lady, I saw a Police van drawing into the street a hundred yards or so away from our pitch.

‘Don’t like the look of that, Bob,’ I said, unstrapping my guitar and packing up.

By the time two policemen had walked over, I was ready to leave.

‘You have to move on,’ they said.

‘Yes, I know. I’m off,’ I said.

The incident had really riled me. I became convinced that this lady was the one who had reported me to the RSPCA. Now that tactic seemed to have failed, she had changed tack. She would go to any lengths to drive us away, it seemed.

Back at the flat that evening, the RSPCA inspector rang me on my mobile and said that I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

‘He’s a special creature, and you’re doing a grand job,’ the lady said. ‘My advice to you is to ignore those who tell you any different.’ It was the wisest advice I’d had for a long time. And, unusually for me, I took it.

Chapter 16

Doctor Bob

I was finding it harder and harder to haul myself out of bed in the morning. For the past few weeks I’d actually grown to dread the sight of the late winter sun, leaking light through my bedroom window.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get up. I wasn’t sleeping well and was usually awake by first light in any case. My reasons for wanting to hide, motionless under the duvet, were very different. I knew that the moment I got up, I would just start coughing again.

I’d suffered from chest problems for some time, but recently they had begun to get really bad. I reasoned it was because I was always on the streets, working outside. But now, no sooner had I got up in the morning, than my lungs and chest were filling up with phlegm and I was coughing really violently almost constantly. At times it was so bad that I was doubling up in pain and I would begin retching and vomiting. It really wasn’t pleasant for me – or anyone else, to be honest. The sounds I was making were pretty horrendous. I was embarrassed to be in public places.