The World According to Bob

he was laughing. I assumed he was in a good mood.
    I waited a few minutes until the crowds had died down a little before recovering the scrunched up note out of my pocket.
    It didn’t take me long to work out that it wasn’t a £50 note. As I’d thought, it was red, but it had a picture of a bearded bloke I’d never seen before on it. It had the number 100 written on it. The writing was in some kind of Eastern European language. The only word that looked familiar was Srbije . I had no idea what it was or what it might be worth. It might have been more than £50 for all I knew. So I packed up my stuff and headed for a Bureau de Change the other side of the Piazza which I knew was open late for tourists.
    ‘Hi, can you tell me what this is worth, please?’ I said to the girl who was behind the window.
    She looked at it and gave me a puzzled look.
    ‘Don’t recognise it, hold on, let me check with someone else,’ she said.
    She went into a back office where I could see an older bloke sitting.
    After a short confab she came back.
    ‘Apparently it’s Serbian, it’s 100 Serbian dinar,’ she said.
    ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Can I exchange it?’
    ‘Let’s see what it’s worth,’ she said tapping away at a computer and then a calculator.
    ‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘That comes out at just over 70p. So we wouldn’t be able to exchange it.’
    I felt disappointed. I’d secretly hoped that it might be enough money to get me and Bob through the weekend. Fat chance. There were times when I got really depressed by the predicament I found myself in. I had turned 30. The majority of guys of my age had a job or a car, a home and a pension plan, maybe even a wife and a few children. I had none of those things. Part of me didn’t actually want them, truth be told. But I did yearn for the security that some of those things brought. I was fed up with living off my wits on the streets. And I was fed up with being humiliated by those who had absolutely no concept of – nor sometimes any sympathy for – the life I was having to lead. There were times when I felt like I was close to breaking point. A few days after that incident with the Mayor, I felt like I had reached it.

    Bob and I finished work early and headed down to the tube, jumping on a Northern line train to Euston then switching on to the Victoria line to Victoria Station. As we weaved our way through the tunnels, Bob walked ahead of me on his lead part of the way. He knew where we were heading.
    We were meeting my father, something I’d begun to do more regularly in recent months. Relations between us had been pretty fraught in the past. When my parents had separated, my mother had won custody and taken me to live on the other side of the world, in Australia, so he’d barely known me when I was growing up as a little boy. By the time I’d come to London as a teenager, I was a real handful. Within a year of getting here, I had disappeared off the face of the earth and started sleeping rough. When I’d resurfaced, he’d tried to help me get back on track, but, to be honest, I had been almost beyond salvation.
    We’d become a bit closer when I’d started cleaning up my act a little and had got into the habit of meeting for a few drinks at a pub at Victoria Station. The staff there were pretty friendly and would let me slip Bob in provided I kept him hidden from the other punters. I’d learned to keep him under a table where he was happy snoozing. It was a cheap and cheerful place and we’d usually have a meal as well. It was always my dad’s treat. Well, I was never going to have the money to treat him, was I?
    As usual, he was waiting there for me.
    ‘So what’s your news?’
    ‘Not a lot,’ I said. ‘I’m getting cheesed off with selling The Big Issue . It’s too dangerous. And London is full of people who don’t give a sh*t about you.’
    I then told him the story about Boris Johnson. He gave me a sympathetic look but his reply was predictable.
    ‘You need to get yourself cleaned up and you need to get yourself a proper job, Jamie,’ he said. (He was the only person who called me that.)
    I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes.
    ‘That’s easier said than done, Dad,’ I said.
    My dad had always been a grafter, a hard worker. He was blue collar to the core. He’d graduated from being an antique dealer to having a washing machine and domestic appliance repair service to a mobility vehicle business. He’d always been his own boss. I don’t