The World According to Bob: The further adventures of one man and his street-wise cat (21 page)

‘I’d like to help you, but I honestly don’t know what you are talking about,’ I said.

They didn’t get angry or pushy in their questioning at all. There was no ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine. They just nodded at my answers, took down some notes and that was it. After about ten minutes, or less, we were done.

‘OK, Mr Bowen, well we need you to stay here for a bit while we look into this further,’ the younger officer said.

By now it had turned into a very bright, sunny afternoon outside. I was impatient to be reunited with Bob and to get back to work. But the clock kept ticking and before I knew it the shadows were lengthening. It was really frustrating and I was also worried about Bob. At one stage a duty PC offered me a cup of tea so I asked about him.

‘It’s OK, he’s with Gillian still downstairs,’ he said. ‘Think she’s been out to get him some treats, so he’s a pretty happy chappie down there.’

Eventually, the two officers who’d first approached me, came back into the interview room.

‘I’m afraid I think we’ve wasted your time and our time,’ they said. ‘The person who made this accusation on the phone hasn’t been willing to come down to give a formal statement. So there’s no corroborating evidence against you and so there will be no charges.’

I was obviously relieved. I felt angry as well, but decided to bottle it up. There was no point in making a formal complaint or threatening legal action, especially as everyone had been so decent. It was best to just get the hell out of there and get back to work.

My main concern, once more was Bob. What had they done with him for all this time?

I had to go down to the reception area to sign out. Bob was there with Gillian, looking as content as when I’d left him. But the moment he saw me his tail started swishing and his ears perked up. He leapt into my arms.

‘Gosh, someone’s pleased to see you,’ Gillian said.

‘Has he been a good boy?’ I asked her.

‘He’s been a star. Haven’t you, Bob?’ she said.

I saw that she had set him up in a corner of her office. She told me that she’d been out to the shops and bought him some cat milk, a pouch of meaty food and an enormous packet of his favourite treats. No wonder he was so happy, I thought.

We chatted for a moment or two while they got my bag and tabard from wherever it had been put during my interview upstairs. Gillian told me in normal circumstances he’d have been placed with any stray dogs that were being held.

‘If you’d been kept in overnight we’d have had to think about putting him there,’ she said. ‘But luckily that won’t be necessary now.’

I’d soon been officially released. The two officers were apologetic again.

‘Just someone being spiteful I guess,’ I said to them, shaking their hands as I left.

By the time I had left the station it was getting towards sunset. All day I’d been paranoid that someone had stolen my pitch so I headed back to Angel just to check.  To my relief, there was no one there.

‘You all right, James?’ one of the flower sellers asked me.

‘Yeah, just someone’s idea of a joke. Reporting me for assault.’

‘Really? What’s wrong with people?’ he said, shaking his head in disgust.

It was a good question, one to which I had absolutely no answer unfortunately.

Around a week to ten days later, Bob and I were selling magazines during the rush hour, when an attractive, blonde lady came up to us. Bob seemed to recognise her and arched his head towards her when she knelt down beside him.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she said to me as she made a fuss of him.

So many faces were flashing past us each night outside the tube, it was hard to register everyone. She could obviously see I was struggling.

‘Tolpuddle Street station? I was the one who looked after Bob the other week,’ she smiled.

‘Oh, yes, of course. Sorry,’ I said, genuinely mortified. ‘It’s Gillian, isn’t it?’

‘Looks like you are both doing well,’ she said.

Community police officers had stopped to talk to us over the years, but she didn’t seem to be ‘on duty’.

She wasn’t in uniform for a start.

‘On my way home from the end of my shift,’ she said, when I mentioned this.

‘We didn’t really have much of a chance to talk when you were at the station the other day, for obvious reasons,’ Gillian said. ‘So how did you two get together?’

She smiled and laughed out loud a couple of times as I recounted our early days together.

‘Soul mates by the sound of it,’ she said.

She could tell that I was busy and that the rush hour was about to begin, so was soon on her way.

‘I might pop in and see you again if that’s all right,’ she said.

‘Sure,’ I said.

She was true to her word and was soon stopping by to see us regularly, often bringing gifts for Bob. He seemed to have a genuine soft spot for her.

Gillian was generous to me as well. On one occasion she brought me a coffee, a sandwich and a cookie from one of the smart local sandwich bars. We chatted for a little while, both of us skirting around what had happened at the station a few weeks earlier. A part of me was curious to find out who had made this allegation against me, but I knew she couldn’t go into too much detail. It would have been too risky for her.

I explained to her what was happening to us with the book and how it seemed to have generated more animosity than anything else.

‘Ah don’t worry about that. People are always jealous of other’s success. It sounds great,’ she said. ‘Your friends and family must be so proud of you.’

‘Yeah, they are,’ I said, giving her a sheepish smile and lighting up a cigarette.

Of course, the truth was that I didn’t have too many friends. Aside from Belle, there was no one to whom I could turn – in the good times or the bad times. I had Bob and that was about it.

It was, in part, the life that I’d made for myself. I was a product of the environment in which I’d spent the past decade.

When I’d been on drugs I’d withdrawn from the world. My most important relationships back then were with my dealers. But even now that I was clean, I found it hard to establish friendships. There were several reasons. Money, for a start. To make friends you had to go out and socialise, which cost money so I very rarely did that. But on a deeper level, I also found it hard to trust people. During the worst period of my drug dependency, I’d stayed in hostels where you knew that anyone could rob you of all your possessions any moment. Even when you were asleep. So I’d become very wary. It was sad, but I still felt that way to a large extent. The events of the past couple of weeks had underlined that. Someone had made a fictitious assault accusation against me. For all I knew it could have been someone I saw every day of the week. It could have been someone I regarded as a ‘friend’.

So as I looked at Bob interacting with Gillian, a part of me wished my life could be as simple and straightforward as his. He had met her in strange circumstances but had immediately sensed he could trust her. He knew in his bones that she was a decent person and so he had embraced her as a friend. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I needed to do that more. I needed to take that same leap of faith. To do that, however, I had to change my life. I had to get off the streets.

Chapter 14

Pride and Prejudice

It was the first Saturday of July and the streets of central London were packed for the annual Gay Pride celebrations. The West End was a sea of colour – well mostly pink – as the hot weather had drawn even more revellers than usual. According to the news, a million people had ventured out on to the streets to watch the huge parade of floats, filled with drag queens, dancers and spectacular costumes snake its way from Oxford Circus, down Regent Street to Trafalgar Square.

I’d decided to kill two birds with one stone, and had spent the day watching the floats and fabulous outfits while also selling a few magazines at a pitch on Oxford Street near Oxford Circus tube station.

It was a lucrative day for all
The Big Issue
sellers so, as a ‘visitor’ from Islington, I had been careful to make sure I stayed within the rules. Some pitches, like my slot outside Angel tube station, are designated to only one authorised vendor but others, like this one, are free to anyone, provided there is no one else working there. I’d also been careful not to ‘float’, the term used to describe selling whilst walking around the streets. I’d fallen foul of that rule in the past and didn’t want to do so again.

During the decade or so that I had been on the streets, Gay Pride had grown from a small, quite political march into one of the city’s biggest street parties. Only the Notting Hill Carnival was bigger. This year the crowds were packed four or five deep in places, but everyone was in an incredibly good mood, including Bob.

He’d got used to being in big crowds. There had been a time when he had a slight phobia of people in really scary outfits. He’d run off years earlier after seeing a guy in a weird, over-sized suit outside Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in Piccadilly Circus. His years of walking the streets of London and Covent Garden in particular, seemed to have eased his fears, however. He’d seen everything from weird, silver-painted human statues to French fire-eaters to giant dragons during Chinese New Year. Today, there was no shortage of outrageous outfits and people blowing horns and whistles but he took it all in his stride. He sat on my shoulder throughout, soaking the party atmosphere up and loving the attention he was getting from the huge crowds. Quite a few people knew him by name and asked to have their picture taken with the pair of us. One or two even said they were looking forward to reading about us in our book.

‘We need to write it first,’ I half-joked.

As the main parade drew to an end late in the afternoon, Bob and I headed towards Soho Square where there was a music stage and some other events and turned into Old Compton Street, home to many of London’s most popular gay bars. The street was absolutely crammed full of people, many of them members of the procession who were now relaxing over a few drinks. About halfway along the street, I decided to have a cigarette. I didn’t have a lighter on me so stopped at a table outside one of the pubs and asked to borrow one. To my surprise, a gay guy wearing nothing but a pair of pink Y-fronts, a pair of angel wings and a halo, produced one. I didn’t want to think where he’d been keeping it.

‘Here you go, mate. Nice cat by the way,’ he said as he lit my cigarette for me.

I was still chatting to the guy when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned round to see an outreach worker called Holly. Judging by the way she was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, I assumed she was off duty, mistakenly as it turned out.

‘James. You’re floating,’ she said.

‘No I’m not, Holly. I stopped to ask that guy for a light. Ask him if you like,’ I said.

‘You were floating, James. I saw you,’ she said, adamant. ‘I’m going to have to report you.’

I was gobsmacked.

‘What? Oh, come on, Holly. You are going to report me for trying to get a light?’ I protested, grabbing hold of the bag in which I now had only a couple of magazines left unsold. ‘I’m done for the day. I didn’t even have my magazines out.’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said, in a really sarcastic tone before sliding off into the crowd.

I wasn’t sure whether to take her threat seriously or not. Every outreach worker was different. Some carried through on their threats, others made them purely to make a point. I decided that she wasn’t going to spoil my day and carried on enjoying the party atmosphere.

I took the Sunday off and went back to work on Monday, as normal. By then I’d forgotten completely about Holly. It was on Wednesday that the trouble began.

Arriving in Islington just before midday, I went to see Rita, the co-ordinator on Islington Green to buy new supplies of magazines.

‘Sorry, James, I can’t sell you any. You are on the “To Be Seen” list,’ she said.

‘What?!’

‘Apparently someone saw you floating in the West End. You know the drill. You’ve got to go over to Head Office in Vauxhall.’

‘Bloody Holly,’ I said to myself.