by Bowen, James
Since I’d started selling The Big Issue a couple of years earlier, I’d learned to be sensible, so I’d decided to plough some of the money back into buying some more magazines for the rest of the week. With Bob on my shoulders, I headed over to see Rita, the co-ordinator on the north side of Islington High Street on the way back to catch the bus home.
From a distance, I could see that she was having an animated conversation with a group of vendors in red bibs who were huddled around something. It turned out to be a bicycle. I got on well with Rita, so knew that I could gently take the mickey.
‘What’s this, Rita?’ I joked. ‘Riding in the Tour de France?’
‘Don’t think so, James,’ she smiled. ‘Someone just sold it to me in exchange for ten magazines. I really don’t know what to do with it to be honest. Bikes aren’t really my thing.’
It was obvious the bike wasn’t in prime condition. There were hints of rust on the handlebars and the light at the front had cracked glass. The paintwork had a few chips and nicks and, just for good measure, one of the mudguards had been snapped in half. Mechanically, though, it looked like it was in reasonable condition.
‘Is it roadworthy?’ I asked Rita.
‘Think so,’ she shrugged. ‘He muttered something about one of the sets of brakes needing a bit of attention but that’s all.’
She could see my mind was working overtime.
‘Why don’t you give it a try, see what you think?’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Can you keep an eye on Bob for a second?’
I was no Bradley Wiggins but I had ridden bikes throughout my childhood and again in London. As part of my rehabilitation a few years earlier, I had been briefly involved with a bicycle building course so I knew a bit about cycle maintenance. It felt good to know some of that training hadn’t gone to waste.
Handing Bob’s lead to Rita, I took the bike and flipped it upside down to inspect it properly. The tyres were inflated and the chain looked like it was well oiled and moving pretty freely. The seat was a little low for me, so I adjusted it up a little. I then took the bike down on to the road and gave it a quick workout. The gears were a tad on the sticky side and, as Rita had warned me, the front brakes weren’t working properly. I had to apply maximum pressure on the handle to get any reaction and even then it wasn’t enough to bring the bike to a halt. I figured there was a problem with the wire inside the cable. It was easily fixed I suspected. The rear brakes were fine, however, which was all I needed to know.
‘What does that mean?’ Rita said when I reported all this back to her.
‘It means it’s OK to ride,’ I said.
By now I’d made a decision.
‘Tell you what, I’ll give you a tenner for it,’ I said.
‘Really. You sure?’ Rita said, a little taken aback.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘OK, deal. You’ll need this as well,’ she said, fishing around under her trolley and producing a rather battered, old black cycle helmet.
I’d always been a bit of a hoarder, collecting bits and pieces, and for a while my little flat had been full of all sorts of junk, from mannequins to road signs. But this was different. This was actually one of the first, sensible investments I’d made in a while. I knew the bike would be useful back up in Tottenham where I could use it for short journeys to the shops or the doctors. I’d make the £10 back in saved bus fares in no time. For the longer journey to work at Angel or into central London I’d carry on taking the bus or the tube. That journey was too treacherous to cycle because of the main roads and junctions I’d have to negotiate. Some of them were notorious cycling accident spots.
It was only then, as I mentally mapped out the journeys that I’d be able to cycle from now on, that it suddenly struck me.
‘Ah, how am I going to get this home?’
Bus drivers don’t let bikes on board and there was no prospect of getting it on a tube. I’d be stopped at the barriers immediately. I might get away with taking it on an overground train, but there were no lines that went anywhere near my flats.
There’s only thing for it, I told myself.
‘OK, Bob, looks like you and I are riding this home,’ I said.
Bob had been soaking up the sunshine on the pavement near Rita but had been keeping half an eye on me throughout. When I’d climbed on the bike, he tilted his head to one side slightly, as if to say: ‘what’s that contraption and why are you sitting on top of it?’
He looked suspiciously at me again as I strapped on the cycle helmet, slung my rucksack on my shoulders and started wheeling the bike towards him.
‘Come on, mate, climb on board,’ I said, reaching down to him and letting him climb on my shoulders.
‘Good luck,’ Rita said.
‘Thanks. I think we’ll need it!’ I said.
The traffic on Islington High Street was heavy and, as usual, at a virtual standstill. So I walked the bike along the pavement for a while, towards Islington Memorial Green. We passed a couple of police officers who gave me a curious look, but said nothing. There was no law against riding a bike with a cat on your shoulders. Well, as far as I was aware there wasn’t. I guess if they’d wanted to pull me over they could have done. They obviously had better things to do with their afternoon, thank God.
I didn’t want to cycle along the High Street so I wheeled the bike across a pedestrian crossing. We drew more than our fair share of glances; the looks on people’s faces ranged from astonishment to hilarity. More than one person stopped in their tracks, pointing at us as if we were visitors from another planet.
We didn’t linger and cut across the corner of the Green, past the Waterstones bookshop, and turned into the main road to north London, Essex Road.
‘OK, here we go, Bob,’ I said, bracing myself to enter the heavy traffic. We were soon weaving our way through the buses, vans, cars and lorries.
Bob and I soon got the hang of it. As I focussed on staying upright, I could feel him re-adjusting himself. Rather than standing he decided, sensibly, to drape himself across my neck, with his head down low and pointing forward. He clearly wanted to settle down and enjoy the ride.
It was mid-afternoon and a lot of children were heading home from school. All along Essex Road groups of kids in uniforms would stop and wave at us. I tried waving back at one point but lost my balance a little bit, sending Bob sliding down my shoulder.
‘Oops, sorry, mate. Won’t do that again,’ I said, as we both regained our equilibrium.
Progress was steady but a little slow at times. If we had to stop because of traffic we were instantly shouted at by someone asking for a photo. At one point, two teenage schoolgirls jumped out into the road to snap themselves with us.
‘Oh my God, this is so cute,’ one of them said, leaning into us so heavily as she posed for her photo that she almost knocked us over.
I hadn’t ridden a bicycle for a few years and I wasn’t exactly in prime physical condition. So I took a little breather every now and again, attracting a posse of onlookers each time I did so. Most smiled their approval but a couple shook their heads disapprovingly.
‘Stupid idiot,’ I heard one middle-aged guy in a suit say as he strode past us.
It didn’t feel stupid at all. In fact, it felt rather fun. And I could tell Bob was having a good time too. His head was right next to mine and I could feel him purring contentedly in my ear.
We travelled all the way down to Newington Green and from there towards Kingsland Road where the road headed down towards Seven Sisters. I had been looking forward to this section. For most of the journey, apart from a couple of little inclines here and there, the road had been fairly flat. At that point, however, I knew that it dropped downhill for a mile or so. I’d be able to freewheel down it quite easily.
To my delight, I saw there was a dedicated bike lane, which was completely empty. Bob and I were soon flying down the hill, the warm summer air blowing through our hair. ‘Woohoo. Isn’t this great Bob?,’ I said at one
point. I felt a bit like Elliott in E.T. – not that I expected us to take off and fly our way back across the north London rooftops at any point, obviously, but we must have been clocking close to 20 miles per hour at one point.
The traffic in the main lane to our right was gridlocked, and people were winding down their windows to let in some air. Some of the expressions on their faces as we whizzed past them were priceless.
A couple of children stuck their heads out of the sun roofs of their cars and shouted at us. A few people just looked on in utter disbelief. It was understandable, I supposed. You don’t see a ginger cat whizzing down a hill on a bike very often.
It only took me about half an hour to get home, which was pretty impressive considering we’d had so many unplanned stops.
As we pulled up in the communal area outside the flats, Bob just hopped off my shoulders as if he was disembarking the bus. This was typical of his laid-back attitude to life. He had taken it all in his stride; just another routine day in London.
Back in the flat, I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening tinkering with the bike. I’d soon fixed the front brakes and given it a general tuning up.
‘There you go,’ I said to Bob, as I stood back to admire my handiwork. ‘I think we’ve got ourselves a Bobmobile.’
I couldn’t be sure, but I was pretty sure that the look he gave me signalled his approval.
People often ask me how Bob and I communicate with each other so well.
‘It’s simple,’ I usually answer. ‘He has his own language, and I’ve learned to understand it.’
It might sound far-fetched, but it’s true.
His main means of communication is body language. He has a range of signals that tell me exactly what he is feeling, and more to the point, what he wants at any particular moment. For instance, if he wants to go to the toilet, when we are walking around the streets, he starts grumbling and growling a little bit. He then starts fidgeting on my shoulder. I don’t need to look at him to know what he is up to; he’s scouting around for a spot with some soft dirt where he can do his business.
If, on the other hand, he is walking on his lead and gets tired he lets out a light, low-pitched grumble or moan-cum-growl. He also refuses to walk an inch. He just looks at me as if to say ‘come on mate, pick me up I’m worn out’.
If he ever gets scared he backs up on my shoulder, or if he is standing on the floor, he performs a reverse manoeuvre so that he is standing between my legs in position in case I need to pick him up. To his credit, it is rare that anything frightens him. The sound of an ambulance or a police car going by with their sirens blaring barely bothers him at all. He is very used to it, living and working in central London. The only thing that freaks him a little is the pressurised air brakes on big lorries and buses. Whenever he hears that loud, hissing sound he recoils and looks scared. On bonfire nights, he also gets a little nervous about the loud bangs and explosions, but he generally enjoys watching the bright, sparkling lights in the sky from the window of my flat.
There are other signals too. For instance, I can tell a lot about his mood from the way he moves his tail. If he is snoozing or asleep his tail is still and quiet, of course. But at other times he wags it around, using different movements. The most common wag is a gentle side-to-side movement, rather like a windscreen wiper on its slowest setting. This is his contentment wag. I’ve spent endless hours sitting around London with him and have seen him doing it when he is being entertained or intrigued by something. The lady who’d tried to steal him at Angel hadn’t been the first to misread this movement. Others had made the same mistake and misconstrued it as a sign of anger. Bob does get angry, but he signals that with a very different tail movement in which he flicks it around, a bit like a fly swatter.
There are subtler messages too. If, for instance, he is worried about me, he comes up really close as if to examine me. If I am feeling under the weather, he often sidles up and listens to my chest. He does a lot of loving things like that. He has this habit of coming up and rubbing against me, purring. He also rubs his face on my hand tilting his head so that I can scratch behind his ear. Animal behaviourists and zoologists are entitled to their opinions, but to me this is Bob’s way of telling me that he loves me.
Of course, the most frequent message he wants to get across relates to food. If he wants me to come to the kitchen to feed him, for instance, he goes around banging on the doors. He is so clever, he could easily unpick one of the child locks I’ve had to fit specifically to keep him out, so I always have to go and check. By the time I get there, he has always removed himself to a spot by the radiator in the corner where he’ll be wearing his most innocent look. But that doesn’t last for long and he’ll soon be pleading for a snack.
Bob is nothing if not persistent and won’t leave me alone until he gets what he wants. He can get quite frustrated if I choose to ignore him and tries all sorts of tricks from tapping me on the knee to giving me the ‘Puss in Boots’ look. There is no end to his creativity when it comes to filling a gap in his tummy.
For a while, his biggest challenge was distracting me while I played computer games on the second-hand Xbox I’d picked up in a charity shop. Most of the time Bob was quite happy to watch me playing. He was fascinated by certain games, especially motor racing ones. He would stand beside me experiencing each bend and manoeuvre. On one occasion, I could have sworn I saw his body swaying as we took a particularly sharp hairpin bend together. He drew the line at action games with a lot of shooting, however. If I was playing one of these he would carry himself off to another corner of the room. If the game – or I – ever got too loud he’d lift up his head and look across. The message was simple: ‘turn it down please, can’t you see I’m trying to snooze’.
I could get really wrapped up in a game. It wasn’t unheard of for me to start a game at 9pm and not finish until the wee small hours. But Bob didn’t appreciate this and would do his damnedest to get my attention, especially when he was hungry.
There were times, however, when I was immune to his charms so he took more drastic measures.
I was playing a game with Belle one night when Bob appeared. He’d had dinner a couple of hours earlier and had decided that he needed a snack. He went through his usual attention-seeking routine, making a selection of noises, draping himself across my feet and rubbing himself against my legs. But we were both so heavily involved in reaching the next level of this game that we didn’t respond at all.
He sloped off for a moment, circling the area where the TV and Xbox were plugged in. After a moment, he moved in towards the control console and pressed his head against the big, touch sensitive button in the middle.
‘Bob, what are you up to?’ I asked innocently, still too engrossed in the game to twig what he was doing.
A moment later, the screen went black and the Xbox started powering down. He had applied enough pressure to the button that he’d switched it off. We had been halfway through a really tricky level of the game, so should have been furious with him. But we both sat there with the same expression of disbelief on our faces.
‘Did he just do what I think he did?’ Belle asked me.
‘Well, I saw it too, so he must have. But I don’t believe it.’
Bob stood there looking triumphant. His expression said it all: ‘So how are you going to ignore me now?’
We don’t always rely on signals and body language. There are times when we have a strange kind of telepathy, as if we both know what the other one is thinking, or doing. We’ve also learned to alert each other to danger.
A few days after I’d acquired the bike, I decided to take Bob to a local park that had just been given a bit of a makeover. By now he was completely comfortable riding around on my shoulders and had become more and more confident, leaning in and out of the corners like a motorbike pillion rider.
The park turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Apart from a few new benches and shrubs and a decent playground for young children,
it seemed nothing much had changed. Bob was keen to explore, nevertheless. If I felt it was safe, I occasionally let him off his lead so that he could enjoy himself scrabbling around in the overgrowth while he did his business. I had just done so today and was sitting, reading a comic and soaking up a few rays of sunshine, when, in the distance, I heard the barking of a dog.
Uh oh, I thought.
At first, I guessed it was a couple of streets away. But as the barking grew louder I realised it was a lot closer than that. In the distance I saw a very large, and very menacing looking, German Shepherd running towards the entrance to the park. The dog was no more than 150 yards away and was off its leash. I could tell it was looking for trouble.
‘Bob,’ I shouted at the overgrowth where, I knew, he was busy conducting his call of nature. ‘Bob, come here.’
For a moment, I was panic stricken. But, as so often in the past, we were on the same wavelength and his head soon popped up in the bushes. I was waving my arms at him, encouraging him to join me without making too much fuss. I didn’t want the dog to spot me. Bob understood what was happening immediately and bolted out of the bushes. He wasn’t afraid of dogs, but he picked his battles wisely. Judging by the noise the German Shepherd was making, this wasn’t a dog with which we wanted to pick a fight.
Bob’s bright ginger coat wasn’t exactly hard to spot amidst the greenery, though, and the dog soon began accelerating towards us, barking even more fiercely. For a moment I had a terrible feeling that Bob had left it too late so I grabbed the bike and got ready to ride it into the firing line if necessary. I knew if the German Shepherd intercepted him, Bob could be in serious trouble.
As so often in the past, however, I’d underestimated him.
He sprinted across the grass and arrived as I crouched down on one knee. In one seamless move, I flipped him on to my shoulder, jumped straight on to the bike, and – with Bob standing on my shoulders – hit the pedals and began cycling out of the park.
