by Scott Allen
Tim settled back into his sleeping bag and mulled over what it could be. A bird pecking at some wood? A squirrel cracking a nut? Fiona trying to break into a sweet shop?
That was all he could come up with before he fell asleep.
11
THE DISCOVERY
‘TIM . . . TIM . . . TIM!’
Tim slowly peeled the sleeping bag away from the side of his face. He had no idea what time it was, but it must have been fairly early in the morning. There was a low thick fog around the house and the farm that made it hard to see more than ten steps in front of the shed roof he was perched on.
‘TIM! TIM! TIM!’ came the voice again, but this time with more urgency. ‘COME AND LOOK AT THIS . . . TIM!’
Tim peered down the road as a small figure emerged from the fog waving his arms frantically over his head. It was Cairo. Tim had forgotten they had arranged to meet at a stupidly early time in the morning.
‘Get down off that roof and come and see this . . . you won’t believe it. I’m not sure if I believe it!’
Tim wriggled out of his sleeping bag and slid off the top of the shed roof with all the grace of a bowl of soup trying to enter a dance competition. He quickly followed Cairo, who was waving him towards the llama field. What he saw next was one of the most amazing things he had ever seen in his life; even better than the lawnmower museum he’d visited last summer.
The llamas were playing football!
It was totally A-MAY-ZING. The llamas were pinging a series of short, fast passes to each other; smashing thunderous shots back off the fence and dribbling the ball as though someone had smeared it in glue and stuck it to their feet.
Tim’s eyes bulged out of his head when he saw what was going on in the field. He made a series of ‘eh’, ‘wha’ and ‘do-ya’ sounds before he eventually managed to form a real sentence, although it wasn’t a very good one.
‘The llamas are playing football!’ he blurted out.
‘We are not dreaming,’ replied Cairo. ‘I’ve already pinched myself a thousand times. Shall I pinch you just to double check?’
‘The llamas are playing football!’ repeated the stunned Tim.
‘Yes, yes they are,’ Cairo agreed.
‘The llamas are playing football!’
‘Don’t say it again,’ warned Cairo, ‘or I really will pinch you.’
‘They are llamas . . .’ Tim said slowly, ‘and they AARRRRRRGGGHHHHH!’ He jumped back, grabbing his arm.
‘I did warn you!’ said Cairo apologetically. ‘Anyway, at least we both know we’re awake now.’
Tim was captivated by the scene unfolding in front of him. The llamas had all the basic skills; heading, shooting, tackling and passing. A few of them could juggle the ball on one foot, some could do headed keepie-ups, and Tim was convinced he saw one of them try a rainbow flick. There are professional footballers being paid a bazillion pounds a week that can’t even kick a ball with their left foot, let alone successfully pull off a rainbow flick. It was truly a sight to behold. For the record, I was equally brilliant with both feet.
The only llama that wasn’t playing football was Ludo. He remained by the gate, looking out into the road. He didn’t seem to be bothered in the slightest about his llama friends playing the beautiful game; it was as if he had better things to do. What these things were, I’ve no idea. Perhaps he was thinking about corned beef. Corned beef was a big deal in my day. Mmmm . . . corned beef.
Tim simply had to tell everyone he had the best football-playing llamas in the country, maybe even the best football-playing animals in the whole world. Lucky for Tim, the rest of the world believes everything they are told by eleven-year-old boys, don’t they?
They don’t?!
Well in that case, we might have a rough ride ahead.
12
THE SECRET
Tim and Cairo watched the llamas play football for hours. The fog had cleared and the llamas didn’t seem to be at all bothered by their new spectators, even with Cairo occasionally hooting ‘Olé, olé!’ after some sublime passing, or singing ‘Score in a minute! We’re gonna score in a minute!’ at every crashing shot. Cairo had never been to a real football match before. He had just heard that this was the kind of thing football fans did sometimes.
‘They’ve obviously got more confident now they’ve started playing in the day, rather than just at night,’ said Cairo, after cheering a particularly spectacular volley by a completely white llama with a light grey flash across his nose and horrendous sticky-out teeth.
‘Yes,’ said Tim, still trying to come to terms with the amazing sight in front of him. ‘But why are they are so good at football?’
‘Perhaps they were like this when we got them,’ replied Cairo, mid-clap at a fantastic forty-yard-long ball.
‘Maybe, but they were in an absolute state before, they were so weak. I think something must have happened to them in this field.’
‘A passing wizard?’ suggested Cairo.
‘Ha, ha,’ replied Tim shrugging off his friend’s unhelpful comment. ‘Hang on . . . their ball has got stuck in the corner of the field; we’d better go and get it.’
The duo wandered over to far side of the field to look for the ball. This meant having to rifle through all the junk that had been dumped over the years.
A rusty hovercraft, a metal trunk filled with wooden shavings, a mouldy jockey’s outfit, a cricket bat with a broken handle, a lime-green sink, a vacuum cleaner with a hole in the top, a clock with no hands, a pink sofa with no cushions, the junk went on and on. Eventually Tim found the ball wedged among a stack of old chimneys and leaned in to fish it out.
‘Hey, hey, look at me in my new hat,’ said Cairo, jumping up and down on the pink sofa.
Tim looked up and saw Cairo doing an odd little dance with a large black thing on his head. He was wobbling it from side to side as he approached Tim, singing as he went. ‘Oohh look at me in my new posh hat, I’m off to the sixth-form prom tonight, off to the sixth-form prommmmmmmm tonnnniiiiggghhhtttt!’
‘That’s not a hat, Cairo; it’s one of those things witches have . . . what are they called?’
‘A cauldron,’ exclaimed Cairo, his eyes lighting up. ‘Maybe some witches gave the llamas a potion and that made them great at football?’
‘Give it here,’ said Tim, grabbing it from Cairo’s head.
He examined it thoroughly from top to bottom. ‘I think it might be an urn . . . you know, what they put dead people in instead of putting them in the ground.’
‘URRRRRR! I had it on my head!’ screamed Cairo, frantically brushing his hair.
‘It says Arthur Muckluck on it,’ said Tim, rubbing some mud off the side of the urn.
‘Who’s Arthur Muckluck?’ wondered Cairo out loud.
‘I think I’ve heard the name before,’ Tim said thoughtfully. ‘My grandad talked about him. A famous singer or something . . . lemme have a think.’
‘We don’t have to think nowadays, we can just check on my phone,’ said Cairo, pulling a battered silver phone from his pocket.
‘That phone is older than me!’ exclaimed Tim. ‘Are you sure it has the internet?’
Cairo ignored Tim’s slap down, tapped my name into his phone and waited for it to do its magic. ‘Here we go,’ he said eventually, as Tim got as close as possible to see what was on the screen.
Cairo began to read in his poshest voice: ‘Ahem, ahem. Arthur Muckluck was one of the world’s greatest footballers. Over fifty England caps, three Cup winners’ medals, two Division One league titles and a World Cup win.
‘A creative genius, rocket quick, brilliant in the air, composed in front of goal and never scared to make crucial, crunching tackles. He even went in goal on two separate occasions – saved two penalties and kept two clean sheets.’
I’m very happy Cairo’s phone has that information on it. It’s exactly how I described myself at the start of the book. See, I told you I was the world’s greatest footballer ever.
&n
bsp; Tim and Cairo looked at each other – their mouths wide open with a mixture of surprise and excitement.
‘The llamas must have eaten the ashes of this Arthur Muckluck bloke that were mixed up in all the grass,’ said Tim.
‘And it’s made them all brilliant footballers,’ added Cairo.
‘Whoa, that is awesome!’ they both exclaimed at the same time.
Cairo’s eyes widened; a stupid idea had fallen into his brain and knocked the ‘eyes wide switch’ by mistake. ‘I’m going to have a go at the grass, it might make me a better footballer.’
‘Be my guest,’ replied Tim, stepping back and waving his hand dramatically at the ground as though he spent all afternoon making it.
Cairo bent down, opened his mouth as wide as possible and took a huge bite out of the muddy grass. Tim burst out laughing.
Cairo stood up and began chewing on the lump of turf he had in his mouth. His face said it all. It started with disgust and revulsion, which was quickly replaced by horror when he bit into something that felt like a worm, then a smidgeon of curiosity, before he finally turned green and spat the grass on to the field.
‘Nice then?’ asked Tim, as Cairo rubbed the inside of his mouth with his fingers.
‘Spptt . . . sppptt . . . spptt! It was disgusting,’ moaned Cairo. ‘But if it makes me brilliant at football then it was worth every chew.’
‘Let’s try it,’ said Tim, bouncing the ball towards Cairo.
Cairo miscontrolled his first touch with his knee, swung his right leg, missed the ball completely and fell over in a heap.
‘Hmmm, the grass doesn’t seem to be working. Perhaps you should eat a load more?’ suggested Tim with a grin.
Cairo tried a keepie-up. He managed just one before the ball squirted off to the left. He sighed. ‘I think one mouthful is enough for me,’ he replied. ‘Let’s just leave it to the llamas shall we. Besides, I’ve decided grass is a little bland for my adventurous taste buds.’
Tim and Cairo weren’t to know that the llamas had eaten up all my ashes, so there were none left in the field. I’m clearly very tasty. However, I’m not sure chomping up the power of a brilliant dead footballer actually works on humans. Let me just check . . . nope, it only works on animals, and possibly birds. Definitely not fish though. They can’t breathe in fields.
‘We can’t tell anyone about this,’ said Tim, staring down at the urn.
‘What? We can’t tell anyone about the llamas? But it’s the most amazing thing ever! It might even help the farm get some extra money,’ cried Cairo.
‘No, I don’t mean about the llamas; I mean the dead-footballer bit!’
‘Oh!’ said Cairo with an expert nod. ‘I see. Why not?’
‘Because everyone will be at it! There’ll be dead footballers ground up and scattered everywhere.’
‘Zombie footballers . . . cooolllllllll. I’d definitely watch that.’
‘No, not zombie footballers. You know what I mean. If anyone asks, we just say we found the llamas like this, and we didn’t find this urn. In fact, we should bury the urn deep in the ground and put the pink sofa over it, so nobody finds it.’
A frown formed on Cairo’s face. ‘But I’m not sure anyone will believe us.’
‘What, that we just found them like this?’
‘Yes, someone is bound to ask questions,’ Cairo said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
‘What do we say then?’
Cairo lay down in the field and looked up into the sky, closed his eyes and breathed in several deep lungfuls of the air. This must be Cairo’s thinking process, thought Tim. He needed to get a new style of thinking like this – tapping a pencil on his teeth just wasn’t working for him.
‘How about we say we got hold of a herd of rare llamas from high in the Andes,’ said Cairo with his eyes still closed.
‘The Andes?’ said Tim.
‘They’re big mountains in South America. There are lots of llamas there. But our ones are going to be extra rare.’
‘So rare that they are a myth . . . like Bigfoot, or the Yeti,’ added Tim gleefully, grasping on to Cairo’s idea.
‘Exactly,’ agreed Cairo. ‘Or the three-nosed man of Croydon.’
‘What?’
‘The three-nosed man of Croydon,’ Cairo repeated. ‘No one has ever seen him, but sometimes the people of Croydon hear these huge mega sneezes. Like tiny earthquakes. Only a man with three noses could do those.’
Tim shook his head in awe. There wasn’t a place called Croydon, was there? It sounded like a magical land.
‘So we’ll just stick with saying they’re super-rare llamas, right?’ he said out loud.
‘Yep,’ replied Cairo, opening his eyes. ‘And no one will ever find out exactly where the llamas came from – cos the Andes are massive.’
He paused and closed his eyes, as though he was imagining something really cool. ‘One more thing,’ he said dreamily. ‘If there are going to be zombie footballers, can I have my own team?’
13
DINNER AT THE GRAVYS
In most good films I’ve seen, even the ones with the subtitles, when a boy tells people about the amazing and unbelievable thing he has just seen, no adult will believe him. He’ll then spend most of the rest of the story trying to show people the brilliant thing he has seen before they believe him.
Well, this isn’t a very good story, so we do things a little differently around here.
Tim and Cairo told the whole Gravy family, who all immediately rushed out to the field and watched the llamas kicking the ball around for another hour or so. Even Fiona came, and she didn’t like football. She had the attention span of an ice cream in an oven.
The llamas seemed to be becoming really confident the more they played, and looked like they were enjoying themselves with their heads held high. Two grey llamas were playing head tennis with each other, while a smaller, sandy-coloured pair were pinging crossfield forty-yard volleys with alarming, pinpoint accuracy. Although best of them all was the llama with the horrendously sticky-out teeth: his feet were a blur as danced and tricked his way round three other llamas before smashing the ball against the pink sofa.
Tim started to feel an overwhelming sense of pride at what he had helped achieve, even though all he’d done was put them in the field.
‘That black one hasn’t moved yet,’ said Fiona.
‘Yeah, that’s Ludo. He just sort of stands there, watching, like he’s the boss or guard of all of them,’ replied Tim.
‘Perhaps he doesn’t like football,’ said Fiona. ‘I like him the best now; football is rubbish.’
‘This is amazing, Tim,’ said Beetroot, her eyes shining. ‘I can’t quite believe what I’m watching.’
‘It’s brilliant,’ added Frank, smiling at him. ‘It really is brilliant. How is this happening?’
‘They are a very rare breed of llama, from high up in the Andes,’ said Tim confidently, trying his hardest to keep a straight face.
‘That’s quite amazing,’ said Frank with a slow nod of his head. ‘I’ve never heard of this kind of llama before.’
‘Oh they are very, very rare,’ added Cairo. ‘Only a handful of people in the Andes know about them.’
‘Well you are the llama expert, Cairo,’ said Frank. Cairo shot Tim a cheeky wink. The lie had passed its test.
At the dinner table that evening the conversation was happy and full of laughter and chatter about the fantastic llamas. It was also probably the first time they had ever all sat down and talked about the ‘beautiful game’ together for longer than two seconds.
‘I reckon you could make some money out of the llamas’ football skills,’ said Cairo, through a mouthful of roast chicken and mash. His table manners were really rather shocking.
‘That’s right, we could,’ added Tim eagerly. ‘Get people to pay to watch them play . . . or, better still, get them to play against a team of humans and sell tickets to the match!’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Frank ge
ntly. ‘They might be great at football, but they’re still just llamas; they don’t know anything about tactics or positions or how the game even works.’
‘We could train them,’ said Tim, refusing to be beaten down. ‘They can pass, shoot, dribble, head, take dead balls and have some pretty cheeky tricks up their sleeves. Better than some real players.’
Frank rubbed his beard. Making money out of llama poo and some wool after Christmas wasn’t going to keep the farm running forever. Since taking on the llamas, he had spent the rest of his time building Fiona’s princess castle and reading books on beekeeping, but he wasn’t getting far with either of them. Perhaps this wasn’t the stupidest idea; it wasn’t every day he saw a load of llamas being brilliant at football. However, like every proper dad he had to ask questions first. In the Secret Rule Book of Being a Father it clearly states that you are never allowed to agree with anything your children say straight away. Oops! I’ve told you about the Secret Rule Book of Being a Father . . . ignore what I just said.
‘But who would train them?’ asked Frank. ‘It’s going to take some time, and I don’t know enough about football to do it.’
‘I could do it,’ said Tim excitedly. ‘I know loads about football.’
‘I could do it,’ shouted Fiona, banging her knife and fork on the table. ‘I will do it for payment in sweets. Large sweets . . . bigger than my head!’
Frank chuckled at both of them. ‘It would be great if you could train them, but you’ve both got school. Proper footballers have to train every single day.’
‘That’s not true,’ replied Tim, pushing his plate away. ‘They get loads of time off and only train in the mornings.’
‘Well, that still doesn’t give you enough time to train them full-time and do school.’
