The World According to Bob

relaxed this time. Bob responded well to her as well as she once more knelt down to check him out.
    I felt a bit more confident this time so engaged her in conversation.
    Again, she made some notes and asked me a couple of questions about what we’d been up to that week and what we had planned in the coming days.
    She sat and watched us interacting together and with the passers-by. RSPCA inspectors are obviously trained to read animal behaviours and she could see that he was perfectly content to be there and to be doing his little stunts for his audience.
    She then headed off again and said she’d be in touch very soon. As she left, she gave Bob another friendly stroke, shook my hand and smiled.
    I carried on for an hour or so, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was about to pack up when I saw a familiar face striding over. It was the housing manager of one of the blocks of flats on Neal Street. We’d clashed before, over my busking, which she objected to for some reason. She had a face like thunder. She had obviously been watching from a window and had seen the RSPCA officer shaking my hand and walking off.
    ‘People are trying to sleep upstairs,’ she said.
    ‘It’s two o’clock in the afternoon,’ I said, genuinely baffled.
    ‘Never mind that,’ she said as if I was some three-year-old child. ‘You shouldn’t be busking here. Can’t you read the sign?’, she said, pointing at a plaque across the road on the side of the building where she worked.
    ‘But I’m not busking there, I’m busking on the other side of the road,’ I said. ‘And I am entitled to do that if I want. The outreach workers and even the Police have told me as much.’
    Again, she wasn’t interested in having a debate about it. She just wanted to rant and rave at me.
    ‘I’ve had enough of you and that bloody cat, I’m going to call the police and have you removed,’ she said, marching off. She seemed even angrier than when she’d arrived.
    Her argument was actually ridiculous. How on earth could I disturb people from their sleep in the middle of the afternoon? I didn’t have an amplifier, so it wasn’t as if I was blasting out a huge amount of sound. And besides, this was a busy street with a lot of traffic passing through at all hours of the day and night. If anything was going to wake up her residents, it was the constant din of delivery vans and lorries and police sirens. It was crazy.
    Despite all this, however, I knew that she did have the law on her side to an extent. There were restrictions on busking in the area and I had to be very careful. So I kept an eagle eye out for the police for the rest of the afternoon.
    Sure enough, about half an hour after I’d had the confrontation with the lady, I saw a Police van drawing into the street a hundred yards or so away from our pitch.
    ‘Don’t like the look of that, Bob,’ I said, unstrapping my guitar and packing up.
    By the time two policemen had walked over, I was ready to leave.
    ‘You have to move on,’ they said.
    ‘Yes, I know. I’m off,’ I said.
    The incident had really riled me. I became convinced that this lady was the one who had reported me to the RSPCA. Now that tactic seemed to have failed, she had changed tack. She would go to any lengths to drive us away, it seemed.
    Back at the flat that evening, the RSPCA inspector rang me on my mobile and said that I had absolutely nothing to worry about.
    ‘He’s a special creature, and you’re doing a grand job,’ the lady said. ‘My advice to you is to ignore those who tell you any different.’ It was the wisest advice I’d had for a long time. And, unusually for me, I took it.
     

Chapter 16
    Doctor Bob
     
     
     
     
     
    I was finding it harder and harder to haul myself out of bed in the morning. For the past few weeks I’d actually grown to dread the sight of the late winter sun, leaking light through my bedroom window.
    It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get up. I wasn’t sleeping well and was usually awake by first light in any case. My reasons for wanting to hide, motionless under the duvet, were very different. I knew that the moment I got up, I would just start coughing again.
    I’d suffered from chest problems for some time, but recently they had begun to get really bad. I reasoned it was because I was always on the streets, working outside. But now, no sooner had I got up in the morning, than my lungs and chest were filling up with phlegm and I was coughing really violently almost