The World According to Bob

investigating the inside of the wheelie bins outside the block of flats.
    I told myself that I could never let a bin bag lie around like that again. It was stupid of me to have done so in the first place. Even if everything was sealed, Bob was such a resourceful and inquisitive character, he’d find a way in.
    Most of all though, I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t often that he was off colour or ill, but whenever he was, the pessimist in me always jumped to the worst possible conclusions. As daft and over-dramatic as it was, over the past days I’d found myself imagining him dying and me having to carry on life without him. It was a prospect that was too scary to contemplate.
    I always said that we were partners, that we needed each other equally. Deep down I believed that wasn’t really true. I felt like I needed him more.
     

Chapter 7
    Cat on a Hoxton Roof
     
     
     
     
     
    Bob and I have always been a fairly distinctive pair. There aren’t many six foot tall blokes walking around the streets of London with a ginger cat sitting on his shoulders, after all. We certainly turn heads.
    For a few months during the summer and autumn of 2009 we made an even more eye-catching sight. Unfortunately, I was in too much pain to enjoy the attention.
    The problems had begun the previous year when I’d travelled to Australia to see my mother. My mum and I had always had a difficult relationship and we’d become estranged for the best part of a decade. Apart from a brief visit to London, the last time I’d seen her was when she’d seen me off at the airport as an 18-year-old heading from Australia to ‘make it’ as a musician in London. In the lost decade that followed, we’d barely talked. Time had healed the wounds a little, so, when she offered to pay for me to visit her in Tasmania, it seemed right that I should go.
    With Bob’s help I’d just managed to make a massive breakthrough and wean myself off methadone. It had left me feeling weak so I needed the break. Bob had stayed with my friend Belle, at her flat near Hoxton in north London, not too far from Angel.
    The long flights to and from Australia had taken their toll on me physically, however. I had known about the risks of spending hours immobile on long haul flights, especially when you are tall, like me, and had done my best to avoid sitting for too long in a cramped seating position. But despite doing my best to walk around the plane as often as possible, I’d come home with a nagging pain in my upper thigh.
    At first it had been manageable and I’d dealt with it by taking ordinary, over-the-counter pain killers. Slowly but surely, however, it had grown worse. I had begun experiencing an incredible cramping feeling, as if my blood had stopped flowing and my muscles were seizing up. I know no human feels rigor mortis, but I had a suspicion if we did, this was the sensation. It was as if I had the leg of a zombie.
    The pain had soon become so bad that I couldn’t sit or lie down with my leg in anything resembling a normal position. If I did I would be in constant muscular pain. So whenever I was watching television or eating a meal at home in the flat I had to sit with my leg on a cushion or another chair. When it came to bedtime I had to sleep with my foot elevated over the end of the bed head.
    I’d been to see the doctor a couple of times, but they had only prescribed stronger pain killers. During the dark days of my heroin addiction, I had injected myself everywhere in my body, including in my groin. I’m sure they felt that my condition, whatever it was, was just some kind of hangover from my abusive past. I hadn’t pushed it, part of me was used to being fobbed off still. It reinforced that old feeling I’d had as a homeless person that I was somehow invisible, that society didn’t regard me as its concern.
    The real problem for me was that I still needed to earn a crust. So that meant that, regardless of how much discomfort I was in, I still had to haul myself out of bed and head to Angel on a daily basis.
    It wasn’t easy. The moment I put my foot on the floor, the pain shot up through my leg like an electric shock. I could only walk three or four steps at a time. So the walk to the bus stop became a marathon, often taking me twice or three times as long as it would normally.
    Bob didn’t know what to make of this at first. He kept giving me quizzical looks, as if to say: ‘what are you doing, mate?’ But he was a smart boy and