Actually, we got Staxa out of the van and into the warehouse without too much trouble. The disaster occurred when we were trying to get him down the stairs. Horses are not famous for descending flights of concrete stairs into the bowels of the Earth. Staxa was no exception. He went down ten steps and stopped. Stopped dead.
Easter was riding him, kicking away with his ten centimetre heels. Luis was in front hauling on the rope attached to his head collar. Staxa was trying to dig his horseshoes into the concrete. The rest of us were standing around at the top of the stairs looking down.
‘This is a shambles, Greystone,’ Rachel said. ‘A typical, four star, fair dinkum, five hundred percent, Greystone shambles.’
‘Well, you think of a better way,’ Luis yelled from in front of the horse. ‘You think of a better way of getting the damn nag to move.’
‘I didn’t build this hellhole,’ Rachel said.
‘Spook him,’ I said.
‘What do you mean? Spook him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s what happens to horses. You read about it in books: they get spooked.’
‘Make like a spook, Luis,’ Rachel yelled. ‘Do a ghost impression.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Luis shouted.
‘We’ll try at this end,’ Rachel yelled back. ‘Right everyone. On the count of three. One, two, three …’
We all started to make ghost noises. Yowelling and whoooing and going eeeeiooo iooeee waaa. We were having a ball. Tanya got quite carried away.
I started leaping up and down, yelling my head off. Rachel shouted, ‘Make like a ghost horse.’ But I didn’t know what sort of noise a ghost horse would make, so I had a go at being a ghost donkey — doing the eeeyore, eeeyore bit.
And what’s more: it worked. The horse took off like a shot. Galloping madly down the stairs and into the stainless steel forest. Luis fell backwards the moment the tension came off the rope and Staxa went stampeding over him, trampling him to death.
Just like that. One minute Luis was alive and shouting. The next minute he was dead.
At least, that’s what it looked like. We all stopped yelling and tiptoed down the stairs to where Luis lay mangled and lifeless. Rachel knelt beside the body, opened her black bag and pulled out a stethoscope and pencil torch. She shone the torch straight into Luis’ eyes and ran the stethoscope over his body.
‘Well, that simplifies matters,’ she said. ‘I was planning to slap a cloth full of ether over his face. As it is, the horse has done the trick. Come on, give us a hand. We’ll have his brain into the horse in a jiffy.’
The horse, meanwhile, had disappeared into the stainless steel forest. You could hear Easter cursing and shouting as he tried to get the beast under control. The steel cylinders made an eerie ‘thunk’ every time Staxa bounced off one.
Up on the stairs, Alex said, ‘Hey, wait up, you can’t put Luis in the horse. It was Scalp that was meant to be …’
‘Change of plan,’ Rachel said. ‘Unless we get this lad into the horse quicksmart, he’s a goner. Deadybones. Kaput.’
‘Luis’ not going to like that,’ Alex said. ‘I don’t think he’s going to like it one bit. He’s meant to be the mastermind. He’s not meant to be the horse.’
‘Luis has got no choice,’ Rachel said. ‘This is his only chance. Go and help round up the horse.’
The rest of us gathered round poor Luis and dragged him off to the operating table. Rachel whispered to me, ‘We’ve lucked out here, Spud. Now no one can blame us for the substitution. We’re doing it for Luis’ own good.’
Of course, I’m no stranger to brain transplants. I’m an old hand. Rachel and Gazza once installed my brain in a vat of warm soup. Then they went and put it in Bluey Doig’s old body. But on both those occasions I’d been out cold. I just woke up at the end of it all. This was the first time I’d ever witnessed one of their dodgy operations. This was the first time I’d ever assisted in one of their dodgy operations. Jeez it was fun.
It was also hard work. It took us all weekend and we hardly slept, just snatched naps on a pile of styrofoam that we’d brought down from the warehouse.
Tanya and I went out for pizza every now and then. Sometimes it was day when we went out, sometimes night. Down in the City of the Provisionally Dead it was always bright with artificial fluorescent daylight. Sometimes everything was so tense you thought your own brain would blow a fuse from the concentration, and Rachel’s face would go dead white behind her mask. She’d speak to Gazza in grunted words that only he could understand. But half the time Gazza seemed to have understood her before she’d even spoken. The probe she wanted inserted, the clamp she wanted clamped, the neural interface she wanted interfaced. Whatever it was, Gazza had done it within seconds. It was wonderful to watch.
Poor old Alex had a rough time of it. In a normal operating theatre, there are heaps of trained nurses to assist. But all we had was Alex and he was a debarred vet. Vets don’t normally do brain surgery. If your poor old dog gets a tumour in its head, the vet will just send it off to doggy heaven for you with a quick injection. So this Staxa Fun caper was a bit out of poor Alex’s league. He had to play the role of theatre staff. Rachel called him ‘Nurse’ every now and then. When he started to complain, mumbling behind his mask that he was a doctor too, Gazza started addressing him as ‘Sister’.
When things were going well, Gazza and Rachel joked and fooled about. They didn’t bicker anymore. I could see what Rachel meant about boring old brain surgery in a boring old hospital driving a girl nuts. There was a bit of an argument at one stage about how much of Luis’ brain should be transplanted. Rachel wasn’t trying to just whip out Staxa’s complete brain and ram Luis’ brain into the space. Staxa knew a lot more about galloping and cantering and trotting than Luis could ever hope to learn.
‘The trick,’ said Rachel, ‘is to connect Luis’ personality and intellect to Staxa’s motor neurones. There’s no way poor old Luis could learn to gallop and jump by Elmbank Cup time. We’ve got to leave the galloping bit to Staxa.’
‘Can’t we leave a bit of Staxa’s personality in as well,’ said Gazza. ‘Sort of augment Luis’ character a bit, give him a bit of horse sense.’
We all groaned, but Rachel said, ‘Sure, why not?’
Easter and Mrs Chandor sparred with each other for the whole weekend. Mrs Chandor kept referring to Easter as ‘Wee Jock.’ Easter said he was of Italian descent, not Scottish. Mrs Chandor pointed out that he was (a) small, and (b) a jockey. Therefore he was Wee Jock and there was nothing he could do about it. Once, when Tanya and I were out in the real world, buying the pizzas, I said to her, ‘I don’t know how much more of your mum’s teasing Easter is going to be able to take.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Tanya said. ‘He’s getting the message.’
‘What message.’
‘Mum likes him. That’s why she keeps teasing him.’
When we’d finished the swap, Gazza and Alex put Luis’ old body in one of the cryonics cylinders for safekeeping. Staxa Fun was still unconcious and it was thought best to take him out to the farm for his recovery. Getting him into the furniture van was simplicity itself. Alex backed the forklift from the warehouse down the concrete stairs, picked up the comatose horse and drove him back up to ground level. It was a bumpy ride, but Staxa wouldn’t have known anything about it. Alex and Easter left for the farm in the van. The rest of us went in search of a taxi.
‘So how does it feel,’ Rachel said to me as we ambled dozily along in the late Sunday sunshine, ‘how does it feel not to be a horse?’
‘Marvellous,’ I said.
‘Thought you’d be pleased.’
‘I wonder what Luis’ going to think when he wakes up,’ Tanya said. ‘He might go ape.’
‘Most likely,’ Rachel said, ‘but we’ll leave that to those two crooks. It’s their problem. I’m going home to sleep for twenty-four hours straight and then I’m going to be Miss Goody Two Shoes again: hyper-respectable pillar of the medical establishment.’
A taxi cruised past and we flagged it down. By the time I’d got my seatbelt on and had given the driver the directions, the rest of them were all asleep in a heap on the back seat.