Horsehead Boy

By Rory Barnes

Spud Wilson is the terror of the track. But he stacks his BMX and dies. Dies? Not quite. A pair of feral brain surgeons bring Spud back from the brink. A hilarious tale of a young boy with absolutely no respect for the great minds of science, who helps the course of true love and makes a new man of himself at the same time.*Shortlisted, Best Novel - Young Adult, Aurealis Awards, 1998Ages 9+

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jul 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730450597

Rory Barnes

Rory Barnes was born in London in 1946, but has lived most of his life in Australia. He studied Philosophy at Monash University before working in various capacities in secondary education. In 1976 he took up a fellowship at Stanford University's Creative Writing Centre and has been a professional writer and teacher of writing ever since. He has written several novels for both adults and teenagers (many of them with Damien Broderick). Barnes has lived in Adelaide for the last 25 years. He is married with two sons. His website is at: http://users.bigpond.net.au/rory.barnes

Book preview

Chapter One

To be blunt, I’m in a vat. That’s what they call it, all these scientists in their white coats, a vat. Or rather, the vat. Sometimes, when they think I’m not listening, they call me the vat brat. But that’s nothing to what I call them.

What I really am is a brain—pickled in soup and all wired up.

I wasn’t always just a brain. A couple of years ago I had a body to match. It was a perfectly good body, although I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I was just Spud Wilson, the terror of Year Seven. I used to ride my BMX down at the local bike track—hooning around on the dirt, doing 180s, doing 360s, doing crossovers, doing bunny hops. You name it, I did it. And I stacked it from time to time. Everyone stacks it from time to time. Sometimes I stacked it mega. Broke the stem. Once I bent the front fork so far back that the bike got lowered and the pedals were scraping the ground. The bike didn’t go too good, but it looked wicked. There was another time when I stacked it so mega that the handlebar almost went through my chest. Maybe a rib got broke. I didn’t tell my foster mum, so she didn’t cart me off to the doctor’s for an X-ray. She’d have moaned about the expense for a month of Sundays. I just had a huge bruise for a few weeks and it was a bit hard to breathe for a while.

I should have been doing better at school. I should have been getting A + for maths and English and spelling and all that, but there are only twenty-four hours in a day. By the time you’ve put in a few hours down at the bike track and watched a few hours of telly and hung out down the bike shop checking the equipment, well, there isn’t actually any time left for homework.

Then one Saturday arvo I went down to the track as per usual—and ended up in a vat. Everything was normal to start with. Mounds of hard dirt with tracks going over and around them. A line of half-buried car tyres—painted white with paint flaking off. A tin judges’ stand for when they have organized competitions; a loudspeaker on a post. A distant view of the sea and a closer view of the oil refinery. My mate Jem was there and a couple of other guys. We were resting on our bikes on top of one of the jumps. Just discussing the finer points of our sport. Then up comes this try-hard on a brand new American Hypercobra—all gleaming duraluminium and hyper-tensile struts. It looked like it cost a thousand bucks. Only the try-hard said it cost seventeen hundred bucks. He said he’d been given it by the sports shop which was sponsoring him. He did have this shirt on with Zippon Sports on it, but anyone can buy one of those. He sat there on his flash bike on the top of the jump and went on and on about how his Hypercobra was state of the art, and how Zippon Sports were going to send him to Tucson, Arizona, to represent Australia at the World BMX Championships, and other claptrap. On and on he went. Pure bilge.

So my mate Jem started to wind him up. ‘Gee,’ said Jem, all wide-eyed and innocent, ‘you must be one of the best riders in town, man.’

‘I’m the best in Australia,’ says the try-hard, ‘and after I go to Tucson, Arizona, I’ll probably be number one in the world.’

‘The world?’ says Jem.

‘Reckon,’ says the try-hard, and looks away at the distance like we were all too thick to even know what being number one meant.

‘I bet you’d be able to do a triple backflip, man,’ says Jem in wonderment.

No-one can do a triple backflip. At least not down at our bike track with the rough dirt that some Council grader-driver has shoved into a few heaps. Maybe in America they’ve got water jumps where you can go somersaulting backwards three times before you land in the drink. But not around our neck of the woods. So Jem keeps winding up the try-hard. ‘I reckon a guy like you, with a Zippon sponsorship and all, would be able to pull a triple backflip. Like off that table-top. That one there.’ And Jem points at the table-top.

The try-hard just looks into the distance and says, ‘I could. But I’m not allowed.’

‘Not allowed!’ says Jem, ‘Not a-llowed?’ And he looks at the try-hard as if he can’t believe his ears. ‘Who doesn’t allow you? Your mum?’

‘Zippon,’ says the try-hard. ‘It’s in my contract.’

‘What contract?’ says Jem.

‘The sponsorship contract,’ says the try-hard. ‘No doing backflips without the coach present.’

‘What coach?’ says Jem

‘Ozzie McKarvel, my coach.’

‘You don’t need a coach to ride a bike,’ says Jem. ‘We all ride bikes without some coach holding our hands and telling us how to do it. So why can’t you?’

‘Like I said,’ says the try-hard. ‘It’s in the contract.’

‘Bulltwang it’s in the contract,’ says Jem.

‘So,’ says the try-hard, ‘Don’t believe me, then.’

‘I don’t,’ says Jem. ‘I reckon you’re full of wind. Even Spud here can pull a single on that table-top.’

‘Single what?’ says the try-hard. ‘Single stack?’

‘Single backflip, man,’ says Jem. ‘What we’ve been talking about for the last half hour.’

‘Oh yeah?’ says the try-hard.

‘Yeah,’ says Jem.

‘This guy can do a backflip?’

‘Course he can do a backflip,’ says Jem. ‘He’s not some loudmouth with tickets on himself

‘Let’s see him do it then,’ says the try-hard.

‘No way, man,’ says Jem, much to my relief. ‘He’s not a performing seal.’

‘That’s right,’ I say, opening my mouth for the first time. ‘I’m not a performing seal.’

‘Performing seal, my bum,’ says the try-hard. ‘You won’t do it, because you can’t do it. You’ve never done a backflip in your life.’

This was the truest statement ever made. It was probably the only true statement in the whole idiot conversation. But Jem wasn’t going to let the try-hard know that. ‘Listen fella,’ he said to the try-hard, ‘you come down here on your fancy bike with your fancy shirt on and spout your fancy bulldust about how you can pull this stunt and that stunt and every other damn stunt in the book and then you say, Oh, I can’t actually do anything because I’m not allowed to. It’s like you were some little kid in kindy and the kindy teacher doesn’t allow you to climb on the climbing frame because you might fall off and hurt your little hooter.’ Jem took a deep breath. I’d never heard him talk so much in my life. He looked to me like a man enjoying what he was doing, which was winding up the try-hard like a two-bob watch.

‘Well, if you reckon this kid can pull a backflip, why doesn’t he pull one?’

I was about to repeat the remark about me not being a seal when Jem spoke up. ‘Oh, Spud’ll pull a flip all right. He’ll pull one good and proper. After you pull one, and not before.’

‘All right,’ the try-hard suddenly says, ‘but he’d better pull one.’ And he takes off on his fancy American bike and does a bit of a circuit of the track, just coasting over the jumps. And then he lines himself up and goes full tilt at the table-top.

The try-hard is panting like a steam train and swinging his bike from side to side as he accelerates towards the table-top. I watch him like a mouse watches a snake. I don’t take my eyes off him, but I mutter out of the side of my mouth, ‘The yob’s going to do it. You’ve dumped me right in it.’

‘Naw, he’ll chicken out,’ Jem says easily. ‘He’ll just pull an ordinary jump.’

But the try-hard is hurtling up the side of the table-top and he’s going straight up into the air like he was a space shuttle. And suddenly he is throwing his weight backwards and the bike is flicking forward and up and the try-hard is upside down in the air with the bike above him. All flashing silver and spinning wheels. A couple of metres below the try-hard’s helmet the hard earth of the table-top is just waiting to crush his skull. But then the whole combo—man and bike—continue effortlessly spinning and when the down-slope of the table-top takes their weight, bike and rider are the right way up. There isn’t even a wobble as he hits the dirt.

‘Holy cow,’ says Jem beside me. ‘Did you see that!’

‘Of course I damn well saw it,’ I say. ‘Wadder you think I was looking at? The clouds?’

‘Man,’ says Jem, letting out a long deep breath. ‘Can that dude ride!’

The dude (somehow try-hard no longer seemed quite the right name for him) was now doing a lap of honour around the track. He was riding with no hands on the handlebars, holding his arms above his head in a V for victory. Everyone on the track was cheering and whistling as he went past.

‘Your turn next,’ says Jem beside me.

‘Get knotted,’ I say to Jem.

‘That was the deal,’ says Jem. ‘He did it, you do it.’

‘It was you who made the deal,’ I say.

‘You didn’t object.’

‘I did. I said I wasn’t a performing seal.’

‘That was when he wanted you to do it without him doing it as well. Now he’s gone and pulled a flip, so you’ve got to pull one too.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ I say.

‘That’s okay,’ says Jem, like he’d just done me a big favour or something.

The dude comes rolling up onto the jump next to me and the guys.

‘Cool, huh,’ he says.

‘Cool, man!’ says Jem in awestruck admiration. ‘That was wicked, man!’

A couple of minutes previously Jem had been taking the mickey out of the dude. Now he was acting like some dopey fan backstage at a rock concert. It made me sick. He’d be asking the dude for his autograph next.

‘Heaps cool,’ Jem says to the dude. ‘Just wicked.’

‘You’ve already said that,’ I say.

‘What’s eating you, Spud? Just mellow out, man.’

The dude says: ‘Your turn now.’

‘Jem’s going to do it,’ I say.

‘The deal was you do it,’ Jem says.

‘That was the deal,’ says the dude.

‘Yeah, well, I’ve decided that it’s more appropriate for Jem to perform the deed.’