Fourteen Llamas and a Forgery

Chapter One: The Man Who Knew the Answers

At twenty past six on a wet Tuesday in February, Benny Platt shouted "Paraguay!" at his television and was correct.

There was no one in the flat to witness this. There had been no one in the flat to witness anything for four years. The contestant on screen, a dental hygienist from Carlisle, said "Uruguay?" in the voice of a woman apologising for existing, and lost eight hundred pounds, and Benny said, "Paraguay, love. Landlocked. Uruguay's got a coast, it's famous for it," and then ate a forkful of shepherd's pie that had been frozen in Lincolnshire and reheated in Swindon and had, somewhere along the way, lost the will to taste of anything.

Benny Platt was sixty-two years old. He had spent thirty-one years with the Royal Mail, first sorting and then delivering, and had retired fourteen months ago with a card signed by eleven colleagues, six of whom had simply written their names, and a voucher for a garden centre. He did not have a garden. He lived in a rented first-floor flat on Bickerstaff Road, above a shop that sold vapes and, for reasons no one had ever explained, birdseed.

In those fourteen months he had accomplished the following: he had learned the names of every presenter on daytime television; he had discovered that if you press the microwave door release with your thumb rather than your finger it makes a more satisfying noise; and he had become, in the privacy of his own front room, one of the finest quiz players in the county. He knew the capital of Burkina Faso. He knew which king died of a surfeit of lampreys. He knew the atomic number of tungsten, though he could not have told you what tungsten was for.

None of this was worth money, or company, or a reason to put trousers on before eleven.

His phone rang at seven, which meant it was Sunday, except that it was Tuesday, which meant something was wrong.

"Dad."

"Kim! It's not Sunday."

"I know it's not Sunday. Can I not ring on a Tuesday?"

"You can ring on any day you like," said Benny, sitting up straighter, muting the television with the reverence of a man muting an organ recital. "It's just that you ring on alternate Sundays, so when the phone goes on a Tuesday my first thought is that somebody's dead."

"Nobody's dead." A pause. Traffic noise; she was walking somewhere in Bristol at speed, the way she did everything. "I've got a thing on. Work thing. I might not make Sunday, that's all, so I thought I'd get in early."

"What's the thing?"

"It's a series. Animals. Unusual animal husbandry, they're calling it, which is a phrase that makes everyone in the office snigger, but it's a commission, so."

"Unusual husbandry." Benny turned the phrase over. "Like what?"

"Like a woman in Cumbria who keeps water buffalo and makes mozzarella. Like a man in Norfolk with two hundred emus and a grudge." She sighed. "It's fine. It's content. What have you been up to?"

This was the part Benny dreaded, and it came every single time, and every single time he was ambushed by it as though it were a car appearing from a hedge.

"Bits and pieces," he said.

"Bits and pieces."

"I've been meaning to look into the U3A. They do a walking group."

"You said that in November."

"It rained a lot in November."

There was a silence with a shape to it, and the shape was his daughter, aged thirty-three, deciding not to say something.

"Right," she said. "Well. Eat a vegetable."

"I had a vegetable. There's carrot in the shepherd's pie."

"There is not carrot in the shepherd's pie."

"There are visible orange pieces, Kim."

She laughed, which was the whole point of the exercise, and said she loved him in the fast, unembarrassed way she'd said it since she was nine, and hung up, and Benny sat with the phone in his hand and the television silently asking a woman from Carlisle about the Peasants' Revolt.

He had not always been like this. That was the thing that snagged. There had been a version of Benny Platt who got up at four in the morning without complaint, who knew every dog on the Old Town round by name and temperament, who could carry a conversation with a widow at number 14 for eleven minutes on a doorstep in the rain and leave her better than he found her. That man had been useful. Then the round was reorganised, and then it was reorganised again, and then he was fifty-eight and being trained on a handheld device by a twenty-three-year-old called Ashleigh who kept saying "does that make sense?" in a tone suggesting it probably didn't, and then he was sixty-one and there was a card and a voucher.

Pamela had left before all of that, in fairness. Four years ago. She had taken a cha-cha class at the leisure centre on a Thursday and come back different, and eleven weeks later she had gone to live in Chippenham with a man named Duncan who had a moustache and a licence to teach Latin American dance to adults. Benny had helped her carry the boxes down. That was the detail he came back to, at two in the morning sometimes. He had helped her carry the boxes down, and he had made sure she took the good corkscrew, because she liked wine and he didn't.

And Gloriana — well. Gloriana was a separate country.

His sister had not spoken to him since Christmas 2019, when Benny, attempting to entertain her husband's nephews, had lit an indoor sparkler in the conservatory. He maintained to this day that the packet said indoor. Gloriana maintained that the curtains had been handmade in Stroud and that the fire brigade had left footprints on a rug she had bought in Marrakesh. She now sat on the borough council, chaired the Regeneration and Prosperity Committee, and had recently launched a campaign for mayor under the slogan LOCAL VALUE, LOCAL VALUES, which was printed on a poster of her face at a size that had frightened Benny in the Sainsbury's car park.

He unmuted the television.

"Which English king," said the host, "was said to have died from eating too many lampreys?"

"Henry the First," said Benny, to nobody. "1135. It's always Henry the First."

The contestant said "Henry the Eighth?" and lost everything, and Benny turned off the television and washed up one fork and one plate and stood at the window looking down at Bickerstaff Road, where a man in a fleece was buying birdseed at half past seven at night, and thought: something has to happen.

He did not believe it would. He had thought it before. He had thought it while sorting, and while walking, and while sitting in the doctor's waiting room being told his blood pressure was "borderline interesting."

But for once, and for the first time in a very long while, the universe had already put something in the post.