The World According to Bob: The further adventures of one man and his street-wise cat (19 page)

One Saturday lunchtime, for instance, I answered a knock on the door and found the guy from the flat across the hallway standing there.

‘Hi, just thought I’d let you know that your cat is out here.’

‘Sorry, erm, no. Must be someone else’s. Mine’s in here,’ I said, turning around to scout around the living room.

‘Bob. Where are you?’

There was no sign of him.

‘No, I’m pretty sure this is him out here. Ginger isn’t he?’ the guy said.

I stepped out into the hallway to discover Bob sitting around the corner, perfectly still on top of a cupboard on the landing with his head pressed against the window, looking down on the street below.

‘He’s been there a while. I noticed him earlier,’ the guy said, heading for the lift.

‘Oh. Thanks,’ I said.

Bob just looked at me as if I was the world’s biggest party pooper. The expression on his face seemed to say: ‘Come on up here and take a look at this view with me, it’s really interesting.’

‘Bob, how the heck have you got there?’ I said, reaching up to collect him.

Belle was visiting and was in the kitchen rustling up a sandwich.

‘Did you let Bob out?’ I asked her back inside the flat.

‘No,’ she said, looking up from the worktop.

‘I can’t work out how he got out into the hallway and hid himself up on top of the cupboard.’

‘Ah, hold on,’ Belle said, a light coming on somewhere inside her head. ‘I popped downstairs about an hour ago to put some rubbish out. You were in the bathroom. I shut the door behind me but he must have slid out without me noticing and then hidden away somewhere when I came back up. He’s so damned clever. I’d love to know what’s going on in his mind sometimes.’

I couldn’t help laughing out loud. It was a subject I’d speculated on quite a lot over the years. I’d often found myself imagining the thought processes Bob went through. I knew it was a pointless exercise and I was only projecting human behaviour onto an animal. Anthropomorphising I think they call it. But I couldn’t resist it.

It wasn’t hard, for instance, to work out why he’d been so happy finding his new vantage point out in the hallway today.

There was nothing Bob loved more than watching the world go by. Inside the flat, he would regularly position himself on the kitchen window sill. He could sit there happily all day, monitoring the goings on below, like some kind of security guard.

His head would follow people as they walked towards and then past our flats. If someone turned into the entrance to the building, he’d stretch himself until he had lost sight of them. It might sound crazy, but I found it incredibly entertaining. He took it so seriously that it was almost as if he had a list of people who were allowed to travel this way at certain times and in certain directions. He’d see someone passing and look as if to say ‘yes, OK, I know who you are’ or ‘come on you’re running late for the bus to work’. At other times he’d get quite agitated, as if he was thinking: ‘Oi, hang on! I don’t recognise you’ or: ‘Hey. You don’t have clearance, where do you think you’re going. Get back here.’

I could easily while away half an hour just watching Bob watching others. Belle and I used to joke that he was on patrol.

Bob’s escape into the hallway today was typical of something else he seemed to love doing as well, playing hide and seek. I’d found him hiding in all sorts of surprising nooks and crannies. He particularly loved anywhere warm.

One evening, I went to have a bath before I went to bed. As I nudged the bathroom door open, I couldn’t help thinking it felt a little odd. Rather than swinging open easily it needed an extra nudge. It felt heavy somehow.

I didn’t think much more of it and started running a bath. I was looking in the mirror by the sink when I noticed something moving on the back of the door amongst the towels I kept in a rack. It was Bob.

‘How on earth have you got up there?’ I said, howling with laughter.

I worked out that he must have climbed on to a shelving unit near the door and then, somehow, jumped from there on to the towels, pulling himself up on to the top of them. It looked pretty uncomfortable as well as precarious but he seemed really happy.

The bathroom was a favourite spot for hide and seek. Another frequent trick of his was to hide inside the clothes horse I often used to dry my washing in the bath tub, especially during winter.

Several times I’d been brushing my teeth or even sitting on the toilet, and suddenly noticed the clothes moving. Bob would then appear, pushing the clothes apart like curtains, his face wearing a sort of
peek-a-boo
expression. He thought it was great entertainment.

Bob’s ability to get into trouble was another source of endless entertainment.

He loved watching television and computer screens. He could while away endless hours watching wildlife programmes or horse racing. He would sit there, as if he was mesmerised. So when we walked past the gleaming new Apple store in Covent Garden one afternoon, I thought I’d give him a treat. The place was bursting with shiny new laptops and desktops, none of which I could remotely afford. But the Apple philosophy was that anyone could stroll in and play around with their technology. So we did.

We had spent a few minutes playing with the computers, surfing the internet and watching YouTube videos when Bob spotted a screen that had a kind of aquarium-style display, with exotic and really colourful fish swimming around. I could see why he was attracted to it. It was absolutely stunning.

I took him over to the giant screen and let him gape at it for a few moments. It was funny to watch. He would follow a particular fish as it progressed around the screen and then disappeared. He would then do a sort of double take. He couldn’t fathom what was happening and darted behind the giant screen, expecting to find the fish there. But when all he saw was a wall of silver and a tangle of leads, he darted back again and started following another fish.

It carried on like this for minutes until he suddenly started getting frenzied and got wrapped up in a cable. I’d been temporarily distracted and turned around to see his paw wrapped around a white cable. He was pulling on it and was threatening to drag one of the giant consoles with him.

‘Oh God, Bob, what are you doing?’ I said.

I’d not been the only one to spot this. A couple of Apple ‘geniuses’ were standing there laughing.

‘He’s a star, isn’t he?’ one of them said.

Unfortunately, they were soon joined by another, more senior member of the team.

‘If he breaks anything, I’m afraid you’d have to cover the costs,’ he said. Given the prices of the products on display in the store, I wasted no time in untangling him and getting the hell out of there.

For Bob, London is an endless source of opportunities to get up to no good. Even the underground has become a place where he can misbehave.

When we first got together he would cling to me closely whenever we travelled underground. He didn’t like going down the escalators and lifts and felt intimidated by the crowds and the claustrophobic atmosphere during the rush hour. Over the years, however, he has conquered his fears. He even has his own identity card, given to him by the staff at Angel tube station and behaves just like any other Londoner, going about his or her business. He trots along the tunnels, always walking as near to the wall as possible, probably for security. When we get to the platform, he stands behind the yellow line, unflustered when the train pulls into the station, despite the noise it makes. He waits for it to go past him, then waits patiently for the doors to slide open before padding quietly on board and checking for an empty seat.

Londoners are notorious for not engaging with their fellow commuters, but even the most ice-hearted melt a little when they see him sitting there, studiously taking in the atmosphere. They snap away with their camera phones then head off to work smiling. Living in London can be such an impersonal and soul-destroying existence. The idea that we are somehow lightening people’s days makes me smile.

Travelling on the tube has its perils, however.

One evening we’d headed home from central London and got the tube to Seven Sisters, the nearest tube station to my flat. There was a lot of maintenance and repair work being done within the tube at the time and Bob had been fascinated by the various bits of equipment and heavy-duty gear that was visible here and there.

It was as we were coming up the escalator that I noticed Bob’s tail was sticky. When I looked at it a little closer, I could see some sort of black, tar-like material on his tail. I then saw that it was also streaked along his body, from the middle of his ribcage back to halfway along his tail.

It was pretty obvious he’d rubbed up against something during his ride on the tube because it wasn’t there beforehand. I was at a loss to know what it was exactly. It looked like engine oil or some sort of heavy grease. It definitely looked like it had come from something mechanical. I guessed he must have rubbed up against some of the engineering equipment somehow.

The one thing I did know was that it was potentially harmful. Bob seemed to have worked this out as well. I saw that he’d spotted the mess and had already decided that giving it a lick wasn’t a good idea.

My phone was low on credit but I had just about enough to make a call and rang a friend, Rosemary, a vet who had helped us out once before when Bob had been ill. She loved Bob and was always willing to help. When I explained what had happened she told me that whatever it was I needed to get it washed off.

‘Motor and engine oil can be highly toxic to cats, especially if it’s ingested or inhaled. It can cause really bad inflammation and burning of organs, especially the lungs. It can also cause breathing problems, seizure and even death in really bad cases,’ she said, scaring me.  ‘So you really need to wash it off him. Does Bob let you bathe him?’ she said. ‘If it doesn’t come off, you should take him to the Blue Cross or another vet first thing in the morning,’ she said just before I ran out of credit and my phone cut out.

Cats seem to fall into two categories when it comes to bath time: there are those who hate it and those that love it. Luckily, Bob falls well and truly into the second camp. In fact, he is a bit obsessed with his bath.

He loves nothing more than climbing into the tub when I run a bath. He has learned that I always run a warm bath rather than a steaming hot one and hops into the tub so that he can paddle around in it for a few minutes.

It is funny – and, of course, very cute – to watch him walking around afterwards as he lifts and shakes one paw at a time.

He also gets very possessive about the bath plug and steals and hides it. I end up using a makeshift plug only to find the real plug lying on the living room floor where Bob has been playing with it.

Sometimes I have to put a jug with a weight on it over the plug to stop him from stealing and hiding it.

So given all that it was no problem getting him into the bath so that I could get this mystery grease off his tail.

I didn’t have to hold him down. I used both hands to rub his tail and his side using some cat-friendly shower gel. I then hosed him down with the shower head. The expression on his face as the jets of water soaked into his body was hilarious, a mix of a grimace and a grin. Finally I dried him off as best I could with a towel. Again he didn’t need much persuasion to be rubbed down. He loved it and was purring throughout.

I managed to get all of the nasty stuff off him. But there was still a faint stain on his tail and body. Over the next few days, however, he was able to lick it and it slowly began to disappear. I popped into the Blue Cross at Islington later that week and got them to give him a quick check up. They told me there was nothing to worry about.

‘Easier said than done, there’s always something to fret about with this one,’ I said to the nurse, realising afterwards that I’d actually begun to sound a little like a parent.