Eye, moon and cat finger tattoos

The cat turned up on the night the 9.40 was held at the junction for forty minutes. I was in the signal box with the lamp turned low and the moon sitting over the goods yard like a clipped fingernail, when something moved on the window ledge. Grey, thin as a coat hanger, with eyes that caught my lamp and held it. I gave her half my cheese sandwich and she took it like a receipt for something owed.

She stayed. Ferris, the day man, says she was a station cat long before I came on, that she sleeps in the lamp room and walks the platform edge at first light checking the rails like a foreman. Last Tuesday she sat on the shelf beside the levers and watched the points for three hours without once blinking. When the fog came down so thick the distant signal went out, she jumped down, went to the door and waited for me to follow. Thirty yards along the track there was a lad from the permanent way, asleep on the ballast with his lamp dead. I'd have walked straight past him.

Mum would say I've gone soft. Maybe I have. The moon only seems to rise over the yard when she's on the ledge, and I've started sketching her in the margins of the train register, the cat and the crescent together, the way you used to doodle on my school jotters. The eyes are the only part I can get right.

Tell Dad the box is warm and I'm not to be worried over. I've decided I'm keeping the cat.