The World According to Bob

then analysed by an expert. But he had been gentle with me and had taught me a few tricks of the trade. During one of the first recordings, for instance, I’d made the classic mistake of fiddling with a pen while talking. When it was played back to me all I could hear was the sound of me tapping the pen against the desk like some manic rock drummer. It was incredibly distracting and annoying.
    The trainer prepared me for the sort of questions I could expect. He predicted, quite rightly, that most people would want to know how I’d ended up on the streets, how Bob had helped changed my life and what the future held for us both. He also prepared me to answer questions about whether I was clean of drugs, which I was happy to do. I felt I had nothing to hide.
    The pieces the newspapers and bloggers had been writing were almost universally nice. A writer from the London Evening Standard had said some lovely things about Bob, writing that he ‘has entranced London like no feline since the days of Dick Whittington’. But he also upset me a little by writing about the holes in my jeans and my ‘blackened teeth and nails’. He also described me as having the ‘pleading manner of someone who is used to being ignored’. I’d been warned to expect that kind of thing; it went with the territory and the bottom line was that I knew I was ‘damaged goods’ as that same writer called me. It wasn’t pleasant though.

    The signing had been scheduled two days ahead of the official publication date, March 15th, which also happened to be my 33rd birthday.
    I hoped that wasn’t going to put a hex on everything. Birthdays hadn’t exactly been a cause for celebration in my life, certainly not since my teens.
    I had spent my 13th birthday in a children’s ward at the Princess Margaret Children’s Hospital in Western Australia. It had been a miserable time in my young life and had only accelerated my downward spiral. Not long afterwards I’d started sniffing glue and experimenting with marijuana. It was the start of my long descent into drug addiction.
    Fast forward ten years, to my 23rd birthday, and I’d been on the streets of London. I might have spent it in a hostel, but I could just as easily have been sleeping rough in an alleyway around Charing Cross. At that point my life was at rock bottom and I had absolutely no recollection of it. The days, weeks, months and years had all blended into each other. The chances are that, if I had been aware it was my birthday, I’d have spent the day trying to beg, borrow or – most likely – steal the money I needed to treat myself to an extra wrap of heroin. I’d probably taken the same reckless gamble I’d taken a hundred times before and risked overdosing by taking an ‘extra hit’. I could easily have ended up like that guy I’d seen on the landing of my flats.
    Ten years further down the road, my life had finally taken a positive turn. That period now seemed like another life and another world. When I looked back I found it hard to believe that I’d lived through that period. But, for good or bad, it would always be a part of me. It was certainly a part of the book. I’d decided not to sugar-coat my story. It was virtually all there, warts and all, which was another one of the reasons I felt so racked with nerves.

    In the hours before the signing, I was due to be filmed by a photographer and cameraman from the Reuters international news agency. He wanted to take a series of photos of Bob and I going about our normal, day-to-day life, travelling around on the tube then busking on Neal Street. I was quite glad of the distraction. By the time I’d finished with the photographer, it was early evening.
    A damp chill was beginning to descend when we got back to Islington and made the familiar walk from Angel tube station. There was no sign of the guy who had ‘acquired’ my pitch outside the tube station. A flower seller told me that the guy and his dog had been causing all sorts of trouble and had already been stripped of the pitch by the co-ordinators. There was now no one from The Big Issue selling magazines outside Angel.
    ‘What a waste,’ I said. ‘I’d built that pitch up into a nice earner for someone.’ But that wasn’t my concern any more. I had other things to worry about.
    Bob and I walked through Islington Memorial Park towards Waterstones. We were early so I let Bob do his business and sat on the bench to enjoy a quiet cigarette. Part of me felt like