Llama United Read online

  To Dad – sorry you missed it

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1 MEET THE GRAVYS

  2 THE BOY IN THE BUSH

  3 A MAGNIFICENT BEAST

  4 THE WORST FARMER EVER

  5 A PIG CALLED TREVOR

  6 THE GRIM PHONE CALL

  7 THE DEAL

  8 THE HERD ARRIVES

  9 THE KICK-ABOUT

  10 THE WAITING GAME

  11 THE DISCOVERY

  12 THE SECRET

  13 DINNER AT THE GRAVYS

  14 MEETING McCLOUD

  15 McCLOUD’S VERDICT

  16 A CALL IN THE NIGHT

  17 TRAINING BEGINS

  18 THE KEEPER

  19 MOTORWAY

  20 PRE-SEASON TRAINING

  21 LLAMA UNITED V BROCKET TOWN

  22 PIRTSMOUTH V LLAMA UNITED

  23 KICKED OUT!

  24 SAVE LLAMA UNITED

  25 THE THIRD-ROUND DRAW

  26 ELBOWS IN BORWICH

  27 THE BANKING CRISIS

  28 BULTON ATHLETIC V LLAMA UNITED

  29 THE GEOFF COREN SHOW

  30 THE KIDNAP

  31 THE HUNT

  32 THE LUDO DISASTER

  33 THE SUBSTITUTE

  34 THE CURSE OF RAY CLICK

  35 THE NEW KEEPER

  36 GUNNERALL V LLAMA UNITED

  37 FRANK’S WIN BONUS

  38 PRE-MATCH NERVES

  39 THE FINAL SHOWDOWN

  40 MR POLSTER

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  PROLOGUE

  Well, hello there. I don’t need to introduce myself do I? You’ll know who I am already, won’t you?

  You don’t?

  OK, well for the few readers who don’t know who I am I’ll enlighten you. I’m Arthur Muckluck – the world’s greatest footballer – EVER.

  What do you mean you’ve never heard of me? I’m Arthur Muckluck: over fifty England caps, three Cup winners’ medals, two Division One league titles and a World Cup winner. A creative genius, rocket quick, brilliant in the air, composed in front of goal and never scared to make crucial, crunching tackles. I even went in goal on two separate occasions – saved two penalties and kept two clean sheets. They used to call me ‘The Legend’ . . .

  You remember me now, don’t you?

  No?! What do they teach you in school nowadays? Don’t you learn about the Golden Age of football? When footballs were as heavy as cannonballs, boots were made out of leather as thick as rump steaks, and football kits were exactly the same as the horrible chunky jumpers your gran knits for Christmas.

  You don’t have lessons about football at school? Oh.

  Poor you.

  Well, this book isn’t really about me – it’s about some llamas, an eleven-year-old boy and some other random fruitcakes who wander into his life. I’m just going to help you along with the story, so you don’t get bored.

  Now, I might have been one of the world’s greatest footballers, but this sadly didn’t stop me having a fatal accident in my kitchen one Tuesday morning. I was doing some keepie-ups with a jar of mayonnaise, a plastic one not a glass one (I’m not stupid!), when I slipped on a slice of cheese that had boldly escaped from the fridge. I came crashing down and then . . . nothing.

  I was a goner. The cheese and the mayonnaise also met a sticky end.

  My wife, a lovely woman who happens to have rather hairy palms, thought it would be nice to scatter my ashes on the first field I ever played football on. The football historians among you will know this was in deepest darkest East London, where I grew up. Unfortunately, my wife is a bit forgetful, and she ended up in a field on a farm nearly three hundred miles away. Close-ish some might say. At least she got the country right.

  It wasn’t a particularly pleasant field; sitting on the outskirts of a small village, and full of weeds and discarded junk. At the time I wished she had picked a better place for me, to be honest. However, by sheer fluke, as you will find out later, she selected a field that plays a crucial role in the rest of this book. Round of applause for my wife . . . no? OK, let’s move on.

  Because of her hairy palms, as she attempted to open the large black urn containing my ashes it slipped out of her grasp and cartwheeled away, scattering my mortal remains all over the grotty field before coming to a rest between a discarded pink sofa and a lime-green sink. The sink had retired there after thirty years in the army. I don’t know where the sofa came from.

  Are you still with me? Good, because this will be important later. For now, let’s go and see what our hero, the eleven-year-old boy I mentioned earlier, is up to . . .

  1

  MEET THE GRAVYS

  Frank Gravy looked out of the window. It was grey, cold and blustery outside. Through the murk he could see his eleven-year-old son, Chipsn, playing football in the puddles in the yard. Not really! He wasn’t called Chipsn; that would mean he would be called Chipsn Gravy. What a stupid name that would be. Frank’s son was actually called, rather boringly, Tim.

  Tim was playing in the puddles on his own because he didn’t have any friends. Two months ago he had lived in the city and had loads of friends at his school. But Frank had decided that he didn’t want to work selling photocopier ink anymore and fancied becoming a farmer in the ‘middle of nowhere’. Which is just next to ‘I’ve never heard of it’ and on the borders of ‘I’m lost, where is this place again?’ The family wasn’t pleased with this sudden job change. It made them all really miserable. The kind of miserable you feel when you discover someone has forgotten to get the pigs-in-blankets for Christmas dinner.

  Tim is eleven, average height, average build, average hair colour, average shoe size, average eye colour, average-sized nose, just average all round really. He would wrongly describe himself as ‘all right’ at everything. He was actually quite good at sport, quite good at English and quite good at computer games, but he always felt there was someone better than him. Tim didn’t have the self-confidence to really push himself to be brilliant at anything. He took small parts in school plays, was the reserve keeper in the football team and was happy coming third or fourth in everything on sports day. Tim didn’t really mind – he had some good friends and was fairly content with being an average sort of fellow. But that all changed when the Gravys left the city.

  Tim’s new school was tiny. It was attended by just twenty children and he was the only child in Year Six. Not only was he the eldest, but he was also the only child in the school with all his own teeth. This sounds odd doesn’t it? But there is a good reason. Every summer, all the children have swimming lessons in the village pond. Large, dark and incredibly cooling in the hot summer months, it’s also green, slimy and full of hidden nasties. The truth is, swimming in the mucky pond not only rots teeth, it isn’t very good for the brain either. Not that the villagers have worked this out. They just think they all have bad teeth because the nearest dentist lives fifty miles away (and they have never even bothered to think about why they aren’t very clever).

  This made Tim, with his average teeth and average brain, stick out like a sore thumb. Every time the teacher asked Tim to answer an easy question, all the other children would laugh, point at his normal set of teeth and scoff at his cleverness. They also mocked his height, his age, his hair and even his choice of socks, which were usually just black. This went on every day for two months solid and made him thoroughly miserable. He was no longer average. Poor Tim; I do hope the rest of this story will make him a bit happier.

  Tim has two very different sisters. Monica is seventeen and, if my maths is correct, the eldest of the Gravy children. She’s a rarity when it comes to older sisters; incredibly cheerful, he
lpful, resourceful, intelligent, caring and brilliant with computers. Luckily for Monica, she goes to college in the nearest town, which has a normal swimming pool. Although Monica doesn’t really like swimming.

  The youngest child is Fiona, and she is everything Monica isn’t: annoying, loud, selfish and demanding. She’s probably about six, and is prone to leaping out of cupboards and demanding sweets. Fiona goes to the same school as Tim but is incredibly popular because she is the only person with blonde hair. So unusual is her hair colour in the village, she is treated like a princess by her fawning classmates. She thinks this is brilliant and is thinking of changing her name to ‘The Lovely Fiona’.

  Then comes Mum, or Beetroot as she is affectionately called by the rest of the family, because that’s the colour she goes when she’s been exercising. She used to be a dance instructor at an old people’s home. There are hardly any old people’s homes in the countryside and usually the last thing country folk want to do is learn how to twerk. She now spends her time making cakes and cookies and doing squat-thrusts. The farmhouse is bursting with tins and boxes full of sweet treats. There are only so many slices of cake you can eat in one day. Believe me I’ve tried. Ten pieces of Battenberg cake one teatime is my record. My sick was pink and yellow for a week.

  Pets next? Nope, the Gravys have no pets, which is rare for a farming family. Tim had never understood what all the fuss was about having a pet. The prospect of picking up warm dog poo and putting it in a plastic bag made him shiver.

  Then right at the back is Dad, or Frank as everyone is going to call him in this book, because hardly anyone is called Frank anymore and I think it’s a name that needs a bit more glory. Most footballers in my day were called Clive or Frank or Roger . . . oh yes, or Pelo. No, not Pelé . . . what a foolish name.

  Frank had sunk all of his money into the farm, which was horribly overpriced considering it only had two fields and one of them was full of rubbish. His other problem was that he knew absolutely nothing about being a farmer, expect for wearing wellingtons and occasionally leaning on fences to slowly give directions to people who were lost. This wouldn’t be enough to keep a farm running. Farming is hard – as Frank and his family are about to find out.

  2

  THE BOY IN THE BUSH

  Tim’s walk to and from school wasn’t particularly pleasant. To avoid the dangerous pavement-less road that the farm sat on, his classmates and his annoying younger sister, he had found a shortcut through the woods. It was a treacherous ten-minute scramble, but it was a small price to pay to avoid being teased before and after school.

  On this particularly grotty Tuesday afternoon, Tim was making his way back from another thoroughly unfulfilling day at school, where he had, once again, learned nothing new. Being able to comfortably recite all the times tables up to twelve had left the rest of the class in fits of laughter for a good twenty minutes. Even the teacher was smirking at him. She had purple hair and carried a fish in her handbag, but no one ever commented on this or thought it was unusual. She could only do up to the three times table, and she really liked swimming in the village pond. Tim felt totally helpless. Spending five days a week in this school made him want to melt into a wall and become an untroubled, happy brick.

  Tim had just grabbed a small, wet branch to stop himself sliding into a puddle as he negotiated the uneven path, when he noticed a pair of wellington boots sticking out from a thick bramble bush. One boot was green and the other was red, and they appeared to be attached to a pair of legs.

  Tim approached with caution. The legs belonged to what looked like a boy of his age. The boy definitely didn’t go to Tim’s school, so he wondered where he had come from and what he was doing in the woods. The bramble bush looked really painful and Tim thought the boy must have tripped and fallen into it, probably knocking himself out in the process. His eyes were shut and his mouth was wide open.

  Tim found a long, thin stick and poked the boy ever so gently in the stomach with it. Like you do with things you are not sure about. The boy didn’t move. Perhaps he was dead, Tim thought, backing away.

  Then, the boy suddenly let out the loudest snore ever and woke up.

  He stared at Tim for a while from his thorny bed. ‘Am I dead?’ he asked in a rough but perky voice. He sounded like a local, but Tim had never seen him before.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Tim, lowering the stick ever so slightly. He wasn’t sure if this boy was going to be a threat. The stick was his only protection.

  ‘Well, that’s good isn’t it? You never know what woodland creatures might have had a little nibble on you while you are trying to have a sleep, do you?’

  Tim shrugged. He’d never wanted to sleep in a bramble bush, or even go camping for that matter. He liked his duvet and the nice, boiling-hot radiator in his bedroom at home too much.

  The boy pulled himself out of the bush and stretched to his full height, which was exactly the same height as Tim. Tim took a step back and eyed him suspiciously. He was dressed like he had escaped from a charity shop. Above his mismatched wellies was a very battered pair of black tracksuit bottoms that had the word ‘girlfriend’ written in pink across the front. Clearly these were girls’ tracksuit bottoms, and he was wearing them the wrong way round. On his body he wore what looked like chain mail over a computer game T-shirt. His face was fairly normal looking apart from the thin moustache he’d drawn in felt-tip pen above his top lip. His clump of black hair was full of twigs and looked like he’d just slept in a bush. Which he had.

  ‘I’m Cairo, pleased to meet you,’ said the boy, with a cheery wave.

  Tim wasn’t sure he had heard him correctly. He can’t have said Cairo, his brain flickered curiously. Nobody is called Cairo.

  ‘Hi Carl,’ Tim’s mouth said carefully. ‘I’m Tim.’ He casually tossed his stick into the nearest bush; this boy seemed friendly.

  Cairo gave him a funny look and burst out laughing, showing a full set of normal white teeth. OK, some were a bit yellow round the edges, but whose aren’t at eleven? Tim did a little inward sigh of relief. Clearly Cairo hadn’t swum in the village pond.

  ‘It’s Cairo, not Carl. Like the capital of Egypt. Cairo.’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ replied Tim politely. He desperately wanted to say ‘Who the broken auntie is called Cairo?’ and ‘Are your parents a bit bonkers?’ but decided that would be rude, especially to someone he’d just met.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the strangely dressed boy said with a grin. ‘I get it all the time. My mum is a big fan of going on holiday. She loves Greece and wanted to call me Athens, but she got in a fluster when she was registering my name and blurted out Cairo instead. I’m glad, ’coz Athens is a girl’s name.’

  Tim frowned. He wasn’t up to speed on which capital cities were girls’ names and which weren’t. ‘Didn’t your dad stop her?’ he asked.

  ‘Nah, I’ve never met him, and Mum doesn’t really talk about him either. Means I can only get in trouble with one person I suppose.’ Cairo smiled and did a tiny shrug. Tim wasn’t great at reading people’s feelings, but even he could tell that Cairo was bothered by not having a dad. ‘Think he lives in Europe somewhere and wears shorts a lot,’ added Cairo. ‘I saw a photo of him once . . . well it was half a photo – the bottom half. I would recognize his legs . . .’ He trailed off and concentrated on shaving away at a long stick – produced from inside his tracksuit bottoms – with what looked like an industrial potato peeler. Tim’s mum usually did all the cooking at home, so he’d never had to use a potato peeler before; he didn’t know they could be used on trees! Oh, before you start raiding the kitchen drawers – don’t use your parents’ potato peeler on a tree; it will snap. Cairo’s one is very special.

  ‘Don’t you go to school in the village?’ Tim asked.

  ‘Nah,’ said Cairo, grinning. ‘I’m home-taught by my mum. It’s quite good really. Today I’ve been learning about the Three Musketeers.’ He pointed at his silly felt-tip-pen moustache.

  �
�Lucky you,’ said Tim, wishing he could be home-taught.

  ‘My mum’s proper job is running an animal shelter.’ The boy waved an arm towards the general direction of the village. ‘Hey, why don’t you come and see it?’

  ‘Um, erm . . . I’m not really sure,’ said Tim hesitantly. He was desperate to make a new friend in the village, if only to have someone to play computer games with or just to kick a football about. However, Cairo did seem a bit odd.

  ‘We’ve got some really interesting animals.’

  Cairo was just as keen to make new friends. Being home-taught made him quite lonely, and Tim seemed nice and normal, not like the rest of the kids in the village. Cairo’s mum didn’t ever let him swim in the village pond. She was clever.

  ‘I’ve also got some really good fizzy drinks . . .’ Cairo added quickly. ‘And I’ve made you a sword for the journey.’

  Cairo handed Tim the piece of branch he had been working on with the potato peeler; it now looked like a beautifully carved samurai katana.

  ‘Wow, that’s brilliant,’ gasped Tim, swooshing it around his head.

  The katana was amazing. But Tim was also a sucker for fizzy drinks, especially as his mum never let him have them, so the prospect of one of those sealed the deal. Maybe Cairo wasn’t that odd after all.

  ‘It’s this way back, won’t take us long,’ said Cairo with a friendly smile.

  So off the pair trotted back to Cairo’s, Tim blissfully unaware that Cairo sometimes liked pouring custard into his wellingtons to see what it felt like on his feet. Probably best not to tell Tim though. He might change his mind about going to Cairo’s house and then we’d have to stop the book and just hum for a bit.

  3

  A MAGNIFICENT BEAST

  The walk to Cairo’s house was a lot longer than Tim expected, but he didn’t really mind. He enjoyed listening to his new friend talking about his favourite topics, which were animals, sauces and people called Keith. Cairo was a bit odd, but a good kind of odd. Not the dribbling and barking-at-the-moon kind of odd.