Friends Like These

by Danny Wallace

  ‘Yeah. His dad ran the Mazda dealership. He had a different car every month. His dad told us it was because he was in the witness protection programme.’

  ‘Well, he’s married now. And Louisa Needham – she’s married too. To a Guy.’

  ‘A guy?’

  ‘No – a Guy. A guy called Guy.’

  ‘She was the first girl I ever sent a valentine to. She used to be obsessed with Shakin’ Stevens. I wonder if Guy looks like Shakin’ Stevens – that would certainly mean Louisa’s life had worked out as planned. I used to hang around her house. I used to play Jet Set Willy in her brother’s room.’

  Anil shot me a concerned look.

  ‘What’s Jet Set Willy?’ he said.

  ‘A game,’ I said.

  Another concerned look.

  ‘What kind of game?’

  ‘A computer game.’

  He looked relieved.

  ‘I never played that. Thank God it’s a computer game. You hear stories about people’s childhoods… hey, remember Michael Amodio?’

  ‘Of course I remember Michael Amodio!’

  He was, after all, the second name in the Book.

  ‘He’s still in Loughborough. We should surprise him!’

  I thought about it. Would that be weird?

  Yeah.

  But sod it…

  ‘We definitely should!’

  I was beaming. This would be fun. Plus, I’d be updating two addresses in my address book. Two for the price of one! Not that that was what this was all about. No, no. This was just a today thing. An excuse to do something random and youthful and not at all grown-up.

  We passed a sign saying TOWN CENTRE.

  ‘Let’s drive that way so you can get your bearings…’

  And so we did. We drove past Geoff’s Toys, which amazingly hadn’t shut down yet, despite seemingly always having a sale on. We passed Charnwood Music, where my mum had signed me up to an ill-fated series of guitar lessons with a man named Roger. Roger had been a lovely teacher, with one bizarrely long thumbnail which was useful for guitar-work but absolutely terrifying when you shook his hand. Things had gone well at first, but we’d had an argument one day when it became clear he was teaching me ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ instead of ‘Thriller’ as I’d insisted. And there was the Curzon cinema. I thought back to my ninth birthday, when my mum had treated me and half a dozen friends to see the new action film in town – Red Sonja. Sadly, it wasn’t until the film had started that anyone realised that the Curzon had put the wrong audience rating up. Someone had placed a PG where a 15 should have been, and my mum was too embarrassed to move us, as we all just sat there, wide-eyed and mildly traumatised, as heads flew across the screen, swords cut through faces and blood spurted violently from sockets where arms had once been. Oh, and then Brigitte Nielsen gave Arnold Schwarzenegger a ‘special hug’, at which point Mum tried to distract us all by dropping a pound on the floor and shouting ‘Scramble!’

  And there – on the corner. McDonald’s. Now that may not sound like a big thing to you, but the arrival of McDonald’s in Loughborough was absolutely one of the defining moments of the late 1980s. Even bloody Moscow got one before we did. Up until ’87, we’d simply had a Wimpy, where you had to share your table with grannies drinking tea, and you had to eat with a knife and fork and use paper serviettes. Despite this, it was a regular Saturday afternoon hangout. Even Gary, the DJ who ran the roller disco in the Leisure Centre, ate there sometimes. Gary was the coolest guy in Loughborough. Possibly even the coolest guy in the whole of the North Leicestershire area. He was probably about twenty, and he wore white jeans and Hawaiian shirts and had blond highlights and he knew my name. He’d sometimes say hello to me in the Wimpy, which made me feel incredibly grown-up. He was Loughborough’s George Michael, and he had a girlfriend. Which made him way cooler than George Michael, who, to be honest, never seemed to be able to meet the right girl.

  And for a while at least, all I wanted in the world was to be like Gary. All I wanted was to grow up and run a weekly two-hour roller disco in a regional leisure centre for children. Only now do I realise he probably worked in Kwik-Fit the rest of the time. Anyway, one day in the Wimpy after Gary had climbed into his electric-blue Ford Capri and shot away, we looked up and were amazed to see a huge, red banner being put up outside the town hall… we rushed out and read it.

  COMING SOON TO LOUGHBOROUGH…

  McDONALD’S!

  We had stood and stared at it, in stunned, silent awe – me and Andy ‘Clementine’ Clements. We couldn’t believe it. We had been chosen! We were to get a McDonald’s! We may have hugged at this point.

  The day it opened, we were first in the queue. Neither of us could handle a Big Mac – in those days we couldn’t even finish a can of Coke – but the fries and the chicken nuggets and the barbecue sauce were a taste sensation. And on its opening day, you got to meet Ronald McDonald himself! He’d come over specially for the opening – he must’ve looked ridiculous on the plane – and in what I could only assume was an attempt to fit in, he’d even adopted a gruff, local accent. He was calling people ‘me duck’ and hiding his American roots and he seemed to know his way around town already! I even heard him grumbling to his mate about the one-way system! I wanted to shake his hand; to thank him for what was surely the finest cuisine the world had ever known. I wanted to know how he’d done it; how a simple clown with a ragtag group of friends had founded one of the global sensations of the 1980s. But I never got the chance. The last time I saw him was when he was being driven away in a yellow transit van with a fag hanging out of his mouth. It was quite an occasion, having Ronald McDonald in town – the only other celebrity I saw in Loughborough was Barbara Windsor, the day she opened the Asda on the high street, when I’d decided my new hobby was autograph collecting. You might remember me appearing in the local newspaper expressing my delight.

  But soon, McDonald’s was a firm part of our Saturday afternoons – as established as the Woolworths pick ’n’ mix counter and a walk around the market, marvelling at the stolen Liverpool tops and knock-off A-Team duvet covers.

  The A-Team had been my particular childhood passion. It was all I cared about for quite some time. I’d written to Jim’ll Fix It, of course, asking if perhaps he could fix it for me to have Dwight Schultz, Mr T, George Peppard and especially Dirk Benedict get in a chopper and pop round to 63 Spinney Hill Drive for the week… and yet somehow it seemed Jimmy Savile was far happier to grant the wishes of children who wanted to know how a tyre factory worked than piling the A-Team into a chopper and sending them 40,000 miles across the world. I couldn’t understand it. Meeting the A-Team was much better television than a visit to a tyre factory. It was almost like Jim’ll Fix It was cheap TV.

  ‘The Wimpy’s still there,’ I said, and Anil nodded, as amazed as I was.

  ‘Shall we go see your old house?’

  So we drove down Forest Road, and up towards Spinney Hill Drive – the road I’d lived on and cycled down for so many years. We parked up outside the house and stared at it. It looked a lot smaller than it used to. They’d put up a basketball net, and a new window in the roof, but they weren’t fooling anyone – the house had shrunk. They had a car painted one of those weird colours – the kind of sparkly aquamarine you occasionally see and assume must have been bought after a short-sighted man had purchased an issue of AutoTrader with printing problems.

  But it was weird that someone else was living there now. Sleeping in my room. Hanging out in my garden. Eating in my kitchen.

  ‘What was that room, again?’ said Anil, pointing at the one closest to us.

  ‘That was my dad’s study,’ I said. ‘And where the computer was.’

  My dad’s an academic. A professor of German studies. Our move from Dundee to Loughborough had been from university to university. Our next moves would be, too.

  ‘I never went in your dad’s study.’

  ‘You must’ve! Surely! You must’ve played Way of the
Exploding Fist on the BBC B in there.’

  He shook his head, sadly.

  ‘Nope.’

  Crikey. He’d never played Way of the Exploding Fist. He’d never played Jet Set Willy. I was beginning to identify serious holes in Anil’s youth.

  The house backed onto university grounds, and growing up, me and my friends had always sneaked on in order to get chased by the security guards. It was fun. We were tiny kids – they were fat old men in dirty blue vans. In our heads, we were doing the most daring thing imaginable, stepping out into enemy territory. We’d hide behind trees, or in bushes, to try and avoid the all-seeing-eyes of the bad guys, who were right up there with the KGB and CIA in terms of organisation and power. And when we were seen, when those dusty vans awkwardly mounted the kerb to give chase across a field, their exhaust pipes rattling and trailing the ground, there was nothing more exhilarating than the collective cry of ‘PEG IT!’ and the mad rush home.

  Suddenly, it was all very tempting again.

  ‘Why don’t we sneak on to the university?’ I said. ‘We might get chased!’

  ‘We’re nearly thirty, Dan. We’re older than the students. The guards will probably think we’re lecturers.’

  The idea instantly lost some of its appeal. Christ. We were old. We were too old to look suspicious. How depressing to look so unsuspicious. What had happened to our youthful menace?

  And then we noticed a curtain twitch and a middle-aged lady staring back at us with what looked like real concern in her eyes.

  I waved, as if to say ‘Hi! I used to live here!’, but then realised we were essentially two grown men parked outside her house staring at her property. And now I was waving at her, as if to say ‘Hi! Me and my Asian friend are going to rob you!’

  ‘PEG IT!’ I shouted, and we did.

  Anil lived down by the little row of shops, just next to a small and tatty green we used to play football on. Everything looked exactly the same. A little greener, with better-tended gardens, but just the same. The newsagent still had the same name above it – A. MISTRY. I had always hoped that A. MISTRY had solved crimes in his spare time, and that running a small newsagent’s was his eccentric passion, like Inspector Morse and classical music, but it turned out that he was just a newsagent. Life is full of little disappointments. Outside, there was a group of kids, swapping stickers and sweets, just as we’d done, right there, at that age.

  ‘I wonder what stickers they’re swapping,’ I said.

  ‘Germany 2006. World Cup stickers,’ said Anil, with some degree of authority in his voice.

  ‘The last time I did that it was Mexico ’86.’

  ‘Did you complete the album?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I needed a Hungarian. I never managed to finish those things. Never managed to finish a hobby.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Not when I was a kid. How about you? You used to do karate, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah… I kind of stuck with that.’

  Anil got his keys out and opened up the door to the family home. And there she was – Mrs Tailor. She looked exactly the same. Loughborough must be magic. Or maybe your memories just don’t get old – even when you meet them in the flesh.

  ‘Daniel!’ she said. ‘How are you? Sit down! I saw you on TV recently.’

  ‘Did you?’ I said.

  ‘You were a bit odd.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Would you like a drink? I have been making masala dosa! I hope you are ready to eat.’

  And then the smell hit me – the glorious smell of Mrs Tailor’s masala dosa! Instantly, any memories I had of being sick in a neighbour’s bin were gone. I pointed my finger in the air, to make me look important.

  ‘I am ready!’ I said.

  And with that, Mrs Tailor sprang into action, darting back into the kitchen where I heard plates clattering and drawers being opened. Within seconds I was sitting in front of the kind of feast I’d last witnessed twenty years before, with dips, and chutneys, and spices, and sauces, and the first of the masala dosa… pancakes filled with vegetables prepared in a fresh coconut sauce. I eagerly tore my dosa apart, while Mrs Tailor looked on, proudly. I felt so welcome, as I looked around the room.

  ‘I see what you mean about the karate,’ I said. When I’d left Loughborough, Anil had only just begun his karate lessons. Apparently, it had gone quite well after that. We were surrounded by literally hundreds of trophies, and certificates, and medals, and a picture of the day Anil got his black belt, during which he had decided to sport an unusually wispy moustache. The kind every teenage boy cultivated the first chance they got. The kind that took between eight and ten months to grow.

  ‘You did karate as well, didn’t you?’ he said.

  ‘It kind of went the way of my other hobbies,’ I said. Hobbies really weren’t my thing. I’d try my hardest, and be desperate to stick with them, but after a while boredom would get the better of me and whatever hobby I’d been passionate about a week before would find its way to the back of another cupboard. I think I managed to collect about eighteen different postcards of passenger jets before realising I had no interest whatsoever in large aircraft. My dalliance with autograph-collecting faded after meeting Barbara Windsor – the last one I got was Emlyn Hughes when I saw him in a shopping centre promoting a new line of Hi-Tec trainers. They’d run out of proper signed photos and I’d had to make do with a photocopy someone had done in the back office of InterSport. And at eleven, I’d given up stamp collecting after suddenly realising one morning that there was no way I was ever going to be able to collect them all.

  But karate, I remember thinking… karate would be different. Karate would last, and be my lifelong passion. Like every other kid in town, I’d just seen The Karate Kid II, and was insisting people call me Daniel-San – just as I’d insisted my dad call me Indy after watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the fourth time. Films of the 1980s had that effect on me; had Loughborough Leisure Centre had the insight to offer courses on Ghostbusting, I’d have been first to sign up. And when it came to the noble art of ka-ra-teh, it wasn’t just me and Anil. Michael Amodio also shared the passion.

  Each week we’d make our way out to some industrial estate where a man with a handlebar moustache and a maroon Jaguar would charge us £2 to stand in a bright room with a dozen older kids and punch the air. My first day didn’t go terribly well. The instructor had told us of the importance of stretching, and so, for twenty minutes, we had all tried to touch our toes, reach for the skies, and do all manner of other stretches I had never, ever found the need to do. My body became more and more relaxed as we lay on the floor, arms above us, trying our best to warm up.

  ‘Right! That’ll do!’ shouted the instructor, whose name, I have just remembered, was George.

  We all started to clamber to our feet. But something happened. Something I just did not see coming. Something terrible.

  I made a small involuntary parping sound.

  I froze.

  My eyes widened.

  My face went hot.

  Had anyone heard?

  Did anyone know?

  ‘WHO WAS THAT?’ shouted George.

  Yes, apparently they did.

  ‘THIS ROOM IS A PLACE OF DISCIPLINE!’

  I could feel Michael Amodio edging away from me to my right.

  ‘WHO WAS THAT?’

  This was awful! It was clearly me! Everyone around me knew – and if they didn’t a few moments ago, it was becoming more obvious by the second! But what should I do? Should I admit to it? This room was a place of discipline, damn it! But it wasn’t my fault! My body just wasn’t used to such manoeuvres!

  George stared at us all. He was furious. Absolutely furious. Christ – what had I done? I had insulted thousands of years of Japanese heritage! I could keep quiet… but this man… this man was an authority figure… and what if this was some kind of ancient test?

  I slowly put my hand up. My eyes remained on the floor.

  George sigh
ed, heavily.

  ‘One of the new kids…’ he said. ‘Trust me, you are not going to be trouble for long.’

  I didn’t want to be trouble! The parp was a parp against my will!

  ‘Down and give me twenty.’

  And so began the beginning of the end.

  I finished off my first masala dosa and looked at Anil.

  ‘My karate career was quite short-lived,’ I said.

  ‘What belt are you?’

  ‘White with red tips.’

  ‘Okay. The first belt.’

  ‘How many people reach the first belt?’

  ‘Basically anyone above the age of five.’

  I could live with that. At least I’d be able to take a four-year-old in a fight. How many people can say that?

  Suddenly, Mrs Tailor was there again. She dumped another masala dosa on my plate and then scuttled off to make more.

  This was great. This was like being nine again. I was staying over at someone’s mum’s house! For the first time in years! I was having a sleepover!

  ‘I think karate runs in our family, somehow,’ said Anil. ‘My brother’s got his own dojo. He’s the current World Kyokushinkai Kata Champion.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ I said, although I wasn’t really sure what Kyokushinkai was. It could have been just jumping, for all I knew. I marvelled at the trophies once more. All I had to show for my karate career was a small plastic card which showed I was up to date with my £2 payments. Maybe if I’d stuck with it, like Anil and Sunil, I’d be the current World Kyokushinkai Kata Champion. Maybe I’d be a world champion at just jumping about.

  The problem with my karate, I think, was that I was just too imaginative with my moves. George, and indeed the entire karate governing body, was quite hung up on every move being performed perfectly, just because that was ‘the way it had been done for thousands of years’. He didn’t understand that perhaps I was trying to move the genre on a little. My moves were unusual, sometimes improvised, with flailing limbs and a refusal to be constricted by the boundaries presented by the karate mats. This was street karate – the street in question being Sesame Street, where no one was ever in danger of getting hurt.