When we got home Gazza was slaving over a hot stove. He was frying lambs’ brains and bacon. Well, I hope they were lambs’ brains. When you share a house with a couple of neurosurgeons, you can never be really sure. Rachel leant on Gazza’s shoulder and peered into the frying pan.
‘Bring some work home from the office, did you, dear?’ she said.
‘I knew you’d say that,’ Gazza said.
‘I knew you’d say that,’ Rachel said.
‘And I knew the pair of you would say that,’ I said.
‘We’re getting into a rut,’ Gazza said. ‘Even the boarder knows what we’re going to say.’
‘The boarder’s not in a rut,’ Rachel said. ‘The boarder’s been having a very interesting day.’
‘Tell all,’ said Gazza.
‘Dish up the tucker,’ I said, ‘and I’ll tell you all about Luis Greystone.’
‘Greystone!’ Gazza said. ‘I haven’t seen that dork since university.’
‘I saw him at my wedding,’ Rachel said.
‘I didn’t go to your wedding, if you’ll remember.’
‘I remember,’ Rachel said. ‘I remember it only too well. You were so drunk at the time you wouldn’t have remembered a thing even if you had been there, which you weren’t.’
‘Stop bickering,’ I said.
‘Yeah, stop bickering, Rachel,’ Gazza said.
‘It’s you who are bickering,’ Rachel said.
‘Arrrgh!’ I said. ‘It’s the pair of you.’
‘You’re right,’ Gazza said. ‘Don’t take any notice of us. Just fire away about Greystone. Where did you meet him?’
So we sat around the kitchen table and ate Gazza’s crumbed brains and bacon and I downed a glass of their wine, although they made their normal remarks about me being too young, and I told them all about the events of the day. After I’d been talking for five minutes Rachel kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on Gazza’s lap. Gazza kept eating one-handed while he massaged the soles of Rachel’s feet with his other hand. They’re actually very fond of each other, my friends Gazza and Rachel. If you ask me, all the bickering is just frustration caused by being so respectable. The truth of the matter is they used to be criminals and they used to have a great time snatching unsuspecting patients out of hospitals and doing illegal things to their brains. Now they honk around in suits and spend all day long cutting dreary old tumours out of dreary old skulls. They’re both bored witless. They’re stir crazy.
When I got to the part of my story where Luis Greystone said he was planning to put my brains into a racehorse, Gazza shrieked with laughter and said, ‘Ripper idea. What a winner!’
‘It’s not a ripper idea,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s a crackpot idea.’ But this time round she didn’t sound very convinced. A couple of glasses of wine and Gazza massaging her feet and she’d given up on bickering.
‘I don’t want to be a horse,’ I said.
‘Yes, you do,’ said Gazza. ‘It would be a hoot.’
‘Look,’ I said with feeling, ‘I’ve already had enough things done to my brain …’
Rachel said, ‘That’s why it would be so easy to …’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘Luis was going on about my artificial neural interfaces.’
‘Luis wouldn’t know a neural interface if he tripped over one in the street.’
‘He seemed to think I was the only possible candidate,’ I said.
‘That bloke’s a dentist, what would he know?’
‘So,’ I said. ‘You and Gazza could put someone else’s brains in the horse? It’s not beyond your surgical skills?’
‘Sure, we’d just have to do more work.’ Rachel said. ‘We’d have to stick in all the hardware. But your head’s already crammed with the stuff. You’re half telephone exchange as it is. I reckon we could do the job in a weekend.’
‘Well, do it in a long weekend. Turn some other poor sucker into a telephone exchange. Stick his brains in the beast.’
‘Whose?’
‘What about yours,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with your brains, Rachel? Why can’t we stick your precious grey-matter in the horse?’
Rachel looked a bit taken aback. Speaking very slowly, she said, ‘The wine’s gone to your head, Spud. There’s a logical flaw in that plan. I’m the neurosurgeon, remember? Even with a good set of mirrors I could hardly be expected to operate on my own brain.’
‘Get Gazza to do it,’ I said. ‘Get Gazza to operate on your brain.’
‘Gazza and I are a team. We work together. You’ve got to be the patient.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I thought you two were meant to be totally legit these days. I thought you didn’t do dodgy brain surgery any more.’
‘Well,’ Rachel shrugged. ‘Everybody’s got to cut loose once in a while. You can’t spend your whole life being Miss Goody Two Shoes. That’s a fact.’
‘Is it really?’ I said.
‘Look, Spuddo, the truth of the matter is that this little scam of Luis’ threatens to be quite a lark.’ Rachel was warming to her theme. She was getting quite enthusiastic. ‘And you’ve no idea how boring ordinary brain surgery is. Just chopping out tumours all day long — it’s not very interesting. You have to admit, life was a lot more fun back in Snood’s Laboratories. Do you remember the fun and games we used to have with the paint and the remote sensing and the office basketball? Remember the ambulance rides? I miss old Nigel, the ambo. Remember the time we went up the scrub to get you some new batteries and your mate Jem was on the roof of the ambulance? And Nige gave it everything he’d got? And there we were hurtling round corners and broadsiding into the paths of oncoming timber jinkers and …’
‘Stop getting sentimental, Rachel,’ I said.
‘I’m not getting sentimental, Spuddo, I’m telling you the truth. Life is a lot less interesting now that we’re all solid citizens. Gazza feels the same. He says so. Don’t you, Gazz?’
‘Sure do,’ said Gazza.
‘And he keeps saying to me: “You’re not the girl I first fell in love with.” And it’s true. I’m just a boring old neurosurgeon. Hacking away at people’s boring old neurones. Day in, day out: slice this tumour, cauterize this node. Saw, hack, slice, zap. Saw, hack, slice, zap. It could drive a girl nuts. But bridging the human–equine interface, now that’s a challenge. That’s something to get one’s teeth into.’
‘Look, I’m real happy, just being Scalp the bike shop man. I don’t want to be a horse.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Rachel said. ‘I know you’re happy, we are all of us happy. We’re totally, absolutely happy. But, bloody hell, there’s more to life than just happy. What we need is excitement, the thrill of the new, the challenge of going where no one has ever gone before …’
‘Into the skull of a horse?’
‘Precisely.’
The argument could have gone on all night, but at that moment there was a loud crash and the sound of splintering wood from the direction of the front door. Footsteps came pounding down the hall and suddenly Luis Greystone burst into the kitchen waving a small crowbar. Alex and the little fella hurtled in after him.
‘Ah,’ yelled Luis. ‘Don’t move. Everybody freeze.’
‘Shut up, Luis,’ Rachel said. ‘Put that damn bar away and sit down.’ She turned to the little fella. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Open that cupboard and get out another bottle of wine, and then sit down like a civilized human being.’
‘How the hell did you get here?’ I said.
‘Followed you,’ said Luis. ‘We just thought you might know more about the whereabouts of these two than you were letting on. That’s why we turned you loose. We’re not stupid, you know. Now then, let’s all have a little chat, shall we?’
‘Let’s not,’ I said, but nobody listened to me.
Luis, Alex and Easter pulled up chairs, poured themselves wine and then everyone started to reminisce. I couldn’t believe it. One minute this gang of vandals comes smashing its way through the door with a crowbar, the next minute everyone is rabbiting on about their student days. All of them except Easter had been at university together — within seconds they were telling anecdotes about people I’d never heard of. You’d have thought we were at some sort of college reunion. I was about ready to throw up. I worked out more or less where Rachel’s legs were under the table and gave her a kick. She jumped a bit, but didn’t stop listening to Luis’ tale about some drunken student called Slosher who’d once climbed the spire of a college chapel in his underpants. I gave Rachel another kick. She turned her head towards me, winked, and went back to listening to Luis.
I just sat there. What was I meant to make of the wink? Were Rachel and Gazza just stringing these goons along? One would like to think so. I mean, earlier in the day I’d been assuring Luis that I was a trustworthy partner in his crackpot scheme. Maybe my friends were just engaging in the same trick.
But there again, maybe they weren’t. I hadn’t been totally thrilled by the way Rachel appeared to have changed sides. In the bike shop she’d said I was totally safe. Then she and Gazza had got carried away with the idea of the scam. They seemed to think it was a wonderful challenge to their surgical skills. I love Rachel dearly, but the truth is: I don’t actually trust her.
More bottles were opened. The laughter became raucous. Everyone hooted and fell about. Rachel asked Luis and Alex what they’d been doing since she’d last seen them at her disaster of a wedding. Alex said that after Bluey had disappeared with Spud in his vat and Snood’s Laboratories had burned down, things had become a bit bleak. The prospects for a couple of likely lads hadn’t been so good out west. They had come east and bought a small farm an hour from town and started the cryonics caper. They’d also bought Staxa Fun and hired Easter to ride him. It had been a stroke of luck when they learned that someone fitting Bluey’s description was running a bike shop in the very same town.
The runt, Easter, seemed a bit left out of things. ‘You weren’t at university with these drunks?’ I said to him.
‘Naw,’ he said. ‘I was just a young claimer in those days.’
‘A young whater?’ I said.
‘Claimer. I was an apprentice jockey so I could claim a handicap.’
‘Doesn’t that make you a claimant?’ I said.
‘Not in the language of the turf,’ Easter said. ‘It’s a different world. Got its own lingo and culture and colourful identities.’
‘Well, it’s a different world to that spooky place we were in this afternoon,’ I said. ‘Tell me more about that joint.’
‘Not much to tell,’ Easter said. ‘It’s Alex and Luis that own the place. But they don’t know anything about bringing the dead back to life again. All they know is that some punters believe that one of these days science will find a way. So anyone with money to pay can get themselves put on ice. Or they can get their pets put on ice.’
‘Pets?’
‘Yeah, there’s one really gigantic tank down there. We call it the Pets’ Pool. It’s full of people’s animals. Dogs, cats, budgies, a couple of ponies, someone’s even got a pet carpet snake in there.’
‘What if they all woke up at once? There’d be a riot.’
‘Naw. Some scientist is going to have to take them out of the nitrogen one by one and do funny things with nano-technology. You know, little microscopic machines that enter your bloodstream and go wandering about fixing up old diseased organs. That’s what all the punters are waiting for — the invention of nano-technology.’
‘Sounds like an earner,’ I said.
‘It’s got overheads. You’ve got to keep topping up the liquid nitrogen.’
‘And it’s legal?’
‘Come off it,’ Easter said. ‘This is Alex and Luis we’re talking about. That sort of thing’s legal in the United States. Here we have to be a bit more … you know, discreet. That’s why it’s hidden under the warehouse.’
‘So how do you get customers?’
‘Word of mouth. And we stick leaflets in letterboxes. Only, the wording on the leaflets is a bit, you know, vague. Then Alex drives around in the van in his undertaker gear. He just parks the van and people come out and start chatting — asking him for a free quote, and asking him why he’s dressed up like that if he’s in the removal business. And Alex tells them he can move more than just furniture. And one thing leads to another. It’s amazing how many punters you can get in that way.’
He was a funny little guy, Easter. Once I’d got him talking, he became quite lively. He wasn’t bursting into gales of laughter like the others, but he seemed eager to please. He gave the impression he wanted to be your friend. I had to keep reminding myself that only that afternoon the little tough had helped kidnap me.