Maybe it’s just my city, but do any of you have an Organic Bob? I feel like everywhere has a fixture. Some cities have landmarks: giant towers that lean to the side or skyscrapers that can’t be seen for clouds. We have Organic Bob. He’s in his mid-sixties and everyone I’ve ever met in this bustling city, has encountered him. He’s ours. You won’t find him in tourist guides, but I reckon he should have a page or two.
He has his favourite haunts. In the morning he plays his harmonica in Lamplight Avenue and screams along to the non-existent beat. By midday, he scourges charity shops for bizarre bric-a-brac and clothes either too big or small. He sleeps on window ledges and pushes his ASDA trolley around the city, on a route more regular than the trains or trams. He’s everywhere all at once. A fixture, like I said.
I don’t know why he’s called Organic Bob. It’s just what he’s called. He’s always been here. Politicians come and go, economies rise and fall, but Bob remains. I like to think when we all go up in a giant mushroom cloud of nuclear poison, he’ll still be here, pushing that trolley along, like Sisyphus up that hill.
My first time meeting him was fairly typical. I was walking to work. The ice had made the ground slick and there were grey clouds that promised rain. He came bursting out a hedge, covered in leaves and bits of branches. He smelled like an old sock and his face was wrinkled and grey. He was missing an arm and his soggy jacket had been sewn up at the edge.
“You got a tin-opener mate?” He asked me.
I was wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase. I was slightly insulted that he thought I looked the sort to be carrying a tin-opener around.
“No I don’t. Sorry pal.” I said, tipping my non-existent hat at him. Any other person might have left it at that and moved along to the next pedestrian. Not Bob.
“Ain’t no one got tin-openers any more. Got a knife or something sharp? Reckon I could cut this tin open at a push…” He hastened his footsteps to carry pace with me. “You look like a fancy chap. Where do you work? Nah… nah let me guess. A bank? Accountancy firm. I used to work down the mines and when they all got closed I got a job up at the castle! Tourist central, but I was only the groundsman. Can’t be arsed with tourists. There’s tunnels underneath the castle, did you know that? Older than the damn building they say. Weird stuff down there. Stuff you wouldn’t believe.”
“No tin-openers though?” I cocked an eyebrow. He shrugged.
“No. So anything sharp mate?”
I shook my head and he left it at that. I saw him ambush some other poor sod on the way to work. I tried to put him out of my mind until lunch, when one of my colleagues started talking about bumping into a bizarre vagrant on their way to work. Jenna lived on the East side, the complete opposite side of the city to me.
“He asked me if I had a tin-opener.” She said coolly. Sounded familiar.
“Oh that’s Organic Bob. That was your first encounter?” Another colleague said, Organic Bob, a strange name I thought. “He pops his head over my fence sometimes and asks to use my hob. Poor sod just wants his breakfast. He likes his meat and baked beans. He carries around big bags of expired sausage he gets from the Butcher’s. Everyone knows him.”
It didn’t make any sense. It had to be a different person. He couldn’t have been on the other side of the city talking to Jenna whilst simultaneously asking me for a tin-opener. How many strange vagrants went around asking for tin-openers? Maybe more than I’d like to imagine.
Then I met him again and it got even more bizarre. I was in my garden starting up the barbeque. The scent of hot charcoal tinged the air black, in hindsight that’s probably what attracted him.
“Got any room on the grill for a couple of patties? I can spare you some of them if you want?” He poked his head above my fence, holding up a sloppy bag of meat. Little dribbles of red were leaking out the corner.
“I ain’t got any room on the barbeque but I’ve got a little disposable one if you want to keep it?” I suggested, thinking of nothing worse than his expired meat filling my garden with it’s sour aroma. He shrugged his shoulders and took the disposable barbeque.
He picked it up with two hands.
He had two arms. The Bob I’d seen had only one. I watched him hobble along the alleyway with his meat and his trolley. One leg. He had a prosthetic. Had I been mistaken the last time? Was it a leg he had been missing all along and not an arm?
It felt wrong. All the little hairs on my arm stood alert as I watched him vanish into the distance. Weird. Cities are full of weird things.
The next time I saw him playing the Harmonica on Lamplight. Then I saw him harassing a young mother for spare change. Then he was arguing with a bus driver about there being no papers on the seats anymore. Everywhere I went Bob was there, wheeling his trolley and dragging around bags of meat. Everywhere all at once.
Once you got in a conversation with Bob, escaping was impossible. He’d hijack you and talk your head off. I’d had earfuls about Thatcher, how expensive Freddos are now and how the city ain’t built for locals these days.
One day I walked passed him screaming with his harmonica and later bumped into him in the local Nisa haggling for a bottle of Buckfast and I swear that I could still hear the awful brag of his harmonica out on the street. It was impossible. It defied all reason. I went to sleep and thought of Bob. There was a map in my head of impossible intersections and far-reaching lines.
I was beginning to get a little obsessed.
I went home and went on google. As it turns out lots of people have noticed Bob. There’s even a site. Bob-Watcher. It charts his location across the city and people check in when they’ve had an encounter. The whole city was lit up like a festival on Snapchat. I clicked a few and noticed that they had been reported at around the same time. Impossible. How was he doing it?
“That trolley got an engine?” I asked him once as he popped his head over my fence. He didn’t want anything for a change, just a chat.
“How’d you mean?”
“You were speaking to a woman across the city five minutes ago enquiring after some spare change. Three minutes before that you were on a bus talking about Thatcher to a group of teens. Two minutes before that you were at a greengrocer asking for expired veg.” I gave him my report and his brows twisted in confusion.
“No I wasn’t.” He said simply.
“Yes you were. They shared photos.” I showed him the evidence on my phone.
“Look I ain’t saying that there wasn’t…someone like me there… just saying it wasn’t me.” He shrugged his shoulders. “There’s roadworks up Haring Street now, did you see? Making the buses all whack. Took me three hours to get up to the castle last night. Three hours! Any chance I could pinch a lift?”
“You’re trolley won’t fit in my boot Bob, why do you want to go to the castle?”
“Been sleeping there. There’s tunnels under the castle, did you know that? Weird stuff there.” He shrugged his shoulders again. I bit my lip furiously. I’d heard that one before. This Bob was missing a right arm.
“Yesterday you didn’t have a leg.”
“Ten years before yesterday I didn’t have this damn cough either.” He spluttered defensively. “Look I can leave the trolley, you gonna give me a lift or not? It’s good to help the homeless. Didn’t your maw tell you that? Really fixes up the karma, y’know and by the looks of your three-story house you’ll be needing lots of karma.”
“Fine.” I grumbled. This would be a good opportunity to investigate.
The car journey was short yet uncomfortable. Bob stunk the place out and filled my ear with stories of coal mines and cold-war experiments. Conspiracy theories, nonsense. Stuff fit for crazed reddit posts.
“You’re a nice man. Not like all those stuck up pricks on the main street. Not like tourists. I really hate tourists.” He grumbled. On that we could agree. “You wanna see something cool?”
My car drew to a halt at the castle. Bob looked at me and I guiltily nodded my head. I ignored the coiling dread in my heart and the hairs on my arm that refused to lay flat. I followed Bob out into the night and down a small ravine.
“These are the tunnels I was telling you about. It’s really neato. A lot of them were blocked off. I had to clear them out, got experience of that y’know, when I was in the coal mines.” Bob led me under a dried up flood gate and down a rusted ladder. Darkness was beneath me. I shouldn’t go down, I thought, he’s going to kill me, fill his little black bags with my meat, I kept thinking. In hindsight, that might have been better. I was too curious to listen to my senses. I wanted to see, I wanted to understand.
I followed after Bob. I nearly fell on the last rung. The tunnels were old, but not as old as the castle. There was a copper roof and a chipped concrete floor. Bob was hobbling unevenly.
“You did me a favour, now I’ll do you one. Ain’t no one let me in their car before. Really nice of you. Usually folks worry about the stink getting in their seats.” He said as he walked, our footsteps echoing a thousand times. “They built this place after the war. Cold-war stuff. Science fiction. There’s lots of wires and shit down here. They were up to something, filled the tunnel up and didn’t think anyone would come looking. They didn’t count on old Bob.”
No one counts on Bob.
“What exactly is down here?”
“Lots of shit like I said. Wires… machines.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know what they were doing, like I said, you ain’t gonna believe it till you see it. I’ve kept it to myself all these years… Been a lil’ lonely having such a big secret. Nice to share it with someone. Y’know?”
He ducked his head into another tunnel and we were going deeper still. I was unnerved, but still I kept walking. Curiosity is a bitch.
Then we came to the end of a tunnel. We were in a dark room with a high ceiling. There were some metal gurneys all rusted orange. There were lots of wires hanging from the ceiling and odd retro devices with slick curves and odd digital dials. Bob moved through the junk and kicked an old generator into life. A few of the machines lit up and beeped jarringly.
“Bob… I’m going to head back out now.” I said. My eyes had noticed it; a meat grinder with silvery sinews slipping down it’s sides.
“Don’t be a scaredy cat. I ain’t showed ya yet.” He said. “I ain’t gonna put you through that meat grinder either you damn conspiracist.”
Being called a conspiracist by Bob was a stab of irony I’d rather not have been wounded by.
“It’s pretty simple. All you do is stick your hand in here.” Bob pointed to a strange device. In the shadowy corner of the room there was a metal cocoon. I hadn’t noticed it at first. Bob put his hand in. The machine whirred and he flinched, as if something had stabbed into his hand. “I reckon they’re still using this. The government. All over the world maybe. Crazy shit.”
“What is it?” I asked as the machine whirred.
“Look, I’m just a simple man. I’d be as happy with a tin-opener and some sausages from the butcher. People ain’t kind anymore. They don’t give money to the homeless. There ain’t no change in wallets anymore. You’ve got to fend for yourself.” Bob said. “Look after number one. It’s easier to do that when there’s…. There’s…”
More than one. Dread coiled in my stomach, my intestines knotted together. The metal cocoon slipped open as Bob pulled out his hand, bright red blood slipping down his fingers.
Naked, hairy and withered he walked. The second Bob. It was a cloning machine… he had cloned himself. I flinched backwards, nearly losing my footing on a gurney. The second Bob look uncertain, but before he could get his bearings the first Bob grabbed him by the arm.
“Arm or Leg?” He asked.
“Arm?” The second Bob said, confused as to the question.
The First Bob pulled him over to the meat grinder and stuck his arm in. He twisted the dial round and newborn Bob screamed. His voice distorted into a mass of pain and agony. I shut my eyes but they couldn’t block out those sounds… when all was said and done there was a pile of ground meat and a very sorry looking Bob.
“What the… what the fuck.” I held back my bile. This was wrong. This was terrifying.
“I’ll be alright.” The second Bob said, his voice fractured with pain. Blood dripped down his side. “I just paid my tax, that’s all. There’s a fixing machine just up there.”
The second Bob went back inside the cocoon and the first Bob clicked a few buttons, when he emerged his arm while still gone, was healed though slightly tinged black at the edges.
“It ain’t like the movies. He’s the same as me. All our thoughts… our memories are shared. We aren’t split apart just to branch off. He’s me.” Bob grinned. “He wants what I want.”
“Free meat.” Bob chuckled. He gathered up the minced meat and slipped it into a black bag. I was wordless, paralyzed by fear. I wasn’t scared of death or dying, I was scared of the world that had made Bob into this. This was wrong. A miracle machine, used for this. “Everytime I use it I know more. I have to know every fucker in this city. Every alleyway. Everytime I use it my head gets bigger. It’s starting to weigh me down.”
“Just for meat?” I said numbly.
“Maybe. This whole city will be full of me one day. On every street you’ll hear my harmonica.” He was laughing, almost maniacally. The second Bob joined in. “I’ve let you in on it, how about it? Two of you. Maybe three. Once you make a clone or two you can set them to work making more.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Ain’t we all.” The second Bob said.
It’s strange. Bob found a magic machine and all he used it for was meat. Maybe that’s why they call him Organic Bob. All his meat is fresh from the bone, no pesticides or antibiotics, just lean beef. Or pork. Totally free-range. It’s terrifying to think about. A thousand Bobs, more and more each day. All-knowing, all-seeing.
He lacks imagination. There’s a whole world beneath this city. A world of Bobs. They pay their taxes, just not to whatever jobber is in Downing Street. As I walked out of the tunnel a line of Bobs trudged in going the other way, I felt my head just a little heavier than it had been before.
“What next?” He asked.
It’s strange to see yourself, scary even.
“You know.” I said.
We know, I corrected.