Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play

by Danny Wallace

  “Hello!” I yelled.

  “Hello!” she yelled back, before wandering through the door and throwing her keys down on the sofa.

  “It’s been a very odd day,” I said, hugging her.

  “For me as well,” she said. “Oh. I see you’ve received a massive box.”

  “I have,” I said.

  “What’s in it?”

  I shrugged.

  “Handy stuff.”

  “It must be quite a lot of handy stuff…”

  I smiled, opened a cupboard door and pushed the box in.

  And when I turned round, Lizzie was holding something up in the air. She made a little ta-da! noise. It was a bottle. A large, green bottle. With a large, white label.

  “Champagne?” I said.

  She kissed me on the cheek, and then smiled.

  “I have some excellent news…”

  CHAPTER THREE

  IN WHICH WE LEARN THE SAD FACT THAT SOMETIMES, IT’S NOT POSSIBLE TO BE FRIENDS FOREVER…

  “I need three cards,” I told the lady behind the counter the next morning. “Each of them celebratory, but each of them balanced by a subtle tinge of regret.”

  The lady had a think about it.

  “That’s quite a specific request,” she said. “Can you be more general?”

  “No,” I said. “But I can be even more specific. One of my requirements is a card for someone who is moving to Chislehurst. Do you have a card for someone who is moving to Chislehurst?”

  She looked around her, at the stock, and put her hands on her hips.

  “Well, we have sympathy cards,” she said, and we both laughed for a very long time indeed. Probably too long, because the man in the queue behind me made a grumpy noise and shuffled about a bit.

  “But seriously,” I said. “Do you have anything like that?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s a niche market,” she explained. “Nobody moves to Chislehurst.”

  Lizzie’s excellent news had indeed been excellent. She’d been offered a job. A new job. A job on the publicity team of the nation’s favorite reality show. The same show she finds herself addicted to whenever it’s on the telly. It was perfect for her. She would be paid to indulge an obsession. I could only imagine what that must be like. And I was happy for her.

  “But it’s going to be tough,” she’d said. “They’d want me at the studio a lot, and it’s all the way out in Borehamwood…”

  I had waved these concerns away, like a magnanimous king telling a peasant he could keep an onion.

  “… and I’d have to work at weekends, and late nights, too. They’re already talking about me staying in a hotel for a lot of it…”

  I’d tried to wave these concerns away, too, but the wave kind of stopped midway.

  “Really?” I’d said. “Well, that’s…”

  “I don’t have to take it, baby… especially as we’ve just moved, and with Wag and Ian being away…”

  “Don’t you worry about Wag and Ian being away. They are both men, following their dreams. They will be back when it all goes wrong.”

  Lizzie had laughed.

  “But I worry about you. You’re so tight with those two.”

  “I have other friends.”

  “Yes, but they’re mainly children you play online at Xbox.”

  “Some of them are very mature.”

  “Who did I hear you calling a pipsqueak last night?”

  “The Bald Assassin. And I called him a nitwit. He always creeps up on me and hits me in the back of the head on Call of Duty. Anyway, I’ll be fine—I’ll just call someone and hang out.”

  “Yeah, you could always call someone, but Wag and Ian, well… they understand you.”

  “What’s not to understand? I am very understandable.”

  “I just mean, they get you.”

  “You get me.”

  “But I’m going to be away so much…”

  “I’ll be fine. I’m nearly thirty.”

  “That’s what I worry about.”

  “I’m not going to be lonely. I’ve got Sky+, an Xbox and broadband.”

  “Nerd. There’s always Friends Reunited…”

  I’d pulled a face which said “the cheek!” and we’d laughed.

  “Look,” she’d said, “I’ll only take the job if—”

  “Lizzie. You have to take the job. I will be personally offended if you do not take the job.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I’d smiled the smile of a confident and in-control late twenty-something.

  But inside, I was thinking, Oh, bollocks…

  Lizzie started work on the new job almost immediately. A PR buzz was already starting around the new season. Who were the new contestants? What would happen to them? How would things change? I smiled as I sat on the sofa, reading the excitement in the Mirror, and felt proud that my missus was doing so well. She was involved in something intriguing. And I was, too. After all, in about twenty minutes, Street Crime UK would be on, and there was time to make a toasted sandwich before that.

  But then the bell rang. And I remembered. It was eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning. And at eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning, I would succumb to the inevitable, and become a man.

  If this was going to happen, it was going to happen on my terms. It was time to seize the day.

  “Mr. Wallace?”

  “Yes?” I said, proudly, opening the door.

  “I’m Paul—you called me about your guttering?”

  “Come in!” I said.

  So this was it. This was the moment I became a boss! I’d chosen Paul out of the Yellow Pages because his advert had said:

  To be or not to be!—well, you did ask for a quote!!!

  I’ll be honest. Now that I’ve written it down, it seems to have lost a fair amount of its humor. But at the time I remember thinking it was good that he had displayed a sense of fun about his work, as guttering can be a very serious business. People have died just thinking about it.

  “Are you that bloke off the telly?” said Paul, and I said yes and smiled. I’d thought perhaps he was going to say he liked my stuff, but he just scowled at me and said, “Right.”

  “The guttering’s round here,” I said, hoping my intricate knowledge of where the guttering was would impress him. “It’s on the outside of the house.”

  “Right—let’s have a look at her.”

  Shit. I should have referred to the guttering as female. Why did I call it “it”? Why didn’t I call her “her”? I was failing already.

  “Yep,” I said, pointing at it. “That’s her. That’s… our lady.”

  “Oooof,” said Paul, shaking his head. “I can tell already, she’s in a bit of a state.”

  Now, I knew from hours of watching House of Horrors and Rogue Traders that this was exactly what men like Paul were supposed to say. But I was under pressure, and all I could manage was, “Is she? That’s sad.”

  “Let me get my ladder,” said Paul, and, because I was the boss, I did.

  Forty minutes and a cup of tea later and Paul was off. He’d be back on Monday, he said, and so long as I paid 80 percent of the money up front it’d all be sorted out quickly and easily. I’d done as he’d asked, and looked forward to seeing him then.

  “Can I leave my ladder here?” he said.

  “Don’t you worry,” I said, “I’ll take care of the little lady.”

  And he’d looked at me a bit oddly.

  I felt like I’d really achieved something, and walked back through the house, wondering if that was enough work to justify knocking off for the day. After all, I’d made someone a cup of tea and patronized a ladder.

  I flicked on the telly. Street Crime UK was halfway through. A policeman was telling a youth to get off a wall. A caption told me this had happened in Birmingham in 2003. Somehow, this made things less exciting. Knowing that several years before, a policeman many miles away had asked a child to get off a wall wasn’t r
eally something I felt I could relay to strangers in an interesting manner. And so I switched the telly off and wandered around the house.

  There was still much to do, DIY-wise. Sockets needed replacing. Walls needed plastering. The toilet needed a new seat. I stood and looked at it all for a bit. I whistled through my teeth like I’d seen builders do, and then scratched my head, because I’d once seen a bloke on a painting show do this, and it had seemed pretty cool.

  I sighed, and realized I could either whistle while staring at a toilet, or do what Lizzie had said—and call someone.

  I reached for my phone and texted Wag.

  Hey. A farewell drink?

  And then I texted Ian.

  Hey. A farewell drink?

  And then I stared at the toilet again. It did nothing of interest. It just sat there. And I just stood there.

  A few moments later, my phone beep-beeped. It was Wag.

  Hey! Can’t! At the American Embassy getting visas! Rock on!

  I nodded, solemnly. He’d be off soon. I looked at the toilet again.

  A minute passed.

  My phone beep-beeped. It was Ian.

  Sorry, Dan—sorting out removal dates. Chislehurst here I come!

  I sighed. This wasn’t fair. Everyone was doing something incredibly exciting. Or moving to Chislehurst. And what was I doing? I was whistling at toilets or watching kids up walls. My friends were moving on without me. Getting on without me. Doing things without me. I was reduced to thinking about sockets and wiring and wallpaper.

  But I knew how to cope with it. I would simply get on with things. I resolved to sort out the sockets.

  “Damn you, the Bald Assassin! DAMN YOU!”

  It was half an hour later and the Bald Assassin was beating me at Call of Duty. I’d been hiding by a window with my sniper scope trained on the window I was certain he was hiding behind, when he snuck into my secret lair and bashed me on the back of the head with his rifle butt. He was always sneaking into my secret lairs and bashing me on the back of the head with his rifle butt. It was the most annoying maneuver he could possibly pull off. It showed that while I needed guns and grenades and binoculars and little maps, all he needed was a small piece of wood. And it didn’t matter where I hid, either. Behind walls. Under tables. On roofs. In bushes. Somehow, the Bald Assassin knew my every move.

  I heard the Bald Assassin laugh through my headset. It was the laugh of the skilled and in control. The Bald Assassin and I never used our microphones to talk to one another. It had gone beyond that. We’d simply scowl at each other, secretly, and then mumble our goodbyes at the end of the game.

  “Bye,” I mumbled. And I switched the Xbox off. Bloody Bald Assassin. Outside, the sky had darkened, and a dull gray light had overtaken the city. Small specks of rain had started to fall, forcing London into a hush as workers and tourists and everyone else stopped hurrying about and just stayed where they were instead. Soon the rain became heavier and the trees outside took the brunt, whole branches waving at me as the shower became a storm.

  I thought about switching the Xbox on again, but the place was a state and there were still all those boxes to unpack. And so, with a sigh, I walked to the spare room where most of them lay. I found some scissors and opened a box at random. DVDs. Ah well. That was easy. I’d sort them later. I opened another. Paperwork. Well, that would require filing expertise, and somewhere to file them all. Later.

  And then I saw a third box. Smaller than the others, but still rather large. Especially if you had to carry it home from the post office, like I’d done.

  The box from my parents.

  Intrigued—and because I still had a pair of scissors in my hands—I sliced through the parcel tape and flipped back the lid.

  And what I saw confused me for a second.

  There were letters. And videos. And photographs. And, more than anything… memories. It appeared to contain the contents of my childhood. A few schoolbooks, the scrapbook I’d kept when I was ten (when I’d wittily whited out the “S” to turn it into a crapbook), and letter after letter after letter.

  I smiled, and laughed, and started to pick through the stuff. I found badges, first: an I AM 7 badge. A Tufty Club badge. My Dennis the Menace Fan Club badge. And then certificates: my Silver Cycling Proficiency certificate, which took me straight back to the playground at Holywell Junior School and the day we took the test. I’d done it on my brand new off-white Raleigh Renegade, and passed with flying colors… mainly because all you had to be able to do to gain your Silver was not fall off. Mind you, it can’t have been that easy. Ian Holmes failed, and he’d arrived on a tricycle.

  And here… here was another one. Another something I hadn’t seen in years… my FIRST PLACE certificate in the North Leicestershire Schools Swimming Association Under-Tens Boys Breaststroke competition. First place! I remembered how proud I’d been. You probably remember the day yourself, because it was all anyone on my street was talking about, so as you’ll know, that was the day I became the fastest nine-year-old in Leicestershire! Well, in north Leicestershire. At breaststroke.

  But they were just details. The 18th of March 1986 was the day I became a winner! Yeah, so it probably remains the only race I have ever won in my life, on land, sea or air, but I thought back to the magical day I’d had to stand up in school assembly to accept my certificate, an experience marred only by the fact that someone official had gotten my name wrong, and when I looked at it, it did not read DANIEL WALLACE, but P. WALLS instead. This offended me as much as a speller as it did as a winner. They hadn’t even given me a new certificate. Just stuck a small white sticker over the front and written my proper name in black ink. They wouldn’t have done that at the Olympics, so why they should do it at Holywell Junior School is anyone’s guess.

  I dug deep into the box and pulled out more stuff. A sticker with a footballer on it. Some copies of Fast Forward magazine. And photos—dozens of old photos. Photos of me as a kid. Photos of me with my friends. Photos of where we lived, and what we did, and of all the fun we had.

  I spread everything out on the floor, and started to pick through it, so much of it firing off memories and triggering thoughts I hadn’t had in decades. Here was a picture of me dressed as a tiny soldier, in the days where all I’d wanted was to be a stuntman like Lee Majors and have Howling Mad Murdoch as my best friend. Here was one from my first day at school in Dundee, complete with blazer and tie, as was the law in Scotland for four-year-olds. That was also the day my mum, in the panic of new experience, had forgotten to give me my first-ever packed lunch. The teachers, insisting that I eat something, had taken me to the canteen and bought me a plate of strange, unfamiliar food. I had never seen a boiled carrot before. It had been in front of me for two, maybe three seconds, staring back at me like a bald orange finger. Nerves took over. I couldn’t eat that! What was it? Where was my mum? Where was my mum’s food? My body did the only sensible thing it could. It vomited on Scott Butcher’s lap. He didn’t seem to mind, and we became great friends. It is the only time I have made a friend this way. If you try it as a grown-up, on a crowded tube train, say, or at a wedding, people tend to frown upon you.

  From Dundee we’d moved to Loughborough, and here was a picture of Mum and Dad and a seven-year-old me standing in front of our new house, looking all proud. My arrival in the East Midlands had caused quite a stir. For a start, as Ian would soon doubtless find with Chislehurst, no one had ever moved to Loughborough before. Added to that, the thick Dundonian accent I’d grown up with in Scotland caused worry and concern among my new neighbors and friends. No one had ever heard anything like it. A few people put forward the theory that perhaps I had been dropped on my head as a baby. Most horribly, when the school play came around, I was given the part of the amusing weather-man, mainly due to the fact that the Scottish weatherman Ian McCaskill was at the height of his broadcasting fame. The rehearsal went well. People laughed in the right places. But on the night, I would recite my lines to a hall packed with silent
, horrified, open-mouthed faces. There was an audible gasp. A woman in the front row made a sympathetic face, as if to tell me how brave she thought I was, coming out here in public with such a terrible condition. At least one person held my mother by the arm, and told her how much she admired her for all she must have been through. “I don’t know how you cope,” she’d said, and my mother, not understanding, just smiled and said yes. The next night I was demoted, and put on as a mute, En glish footballer. And two or three months later, my accent turned En glish too.

  It was strange. The last time I’d seen these places, I’d been in them. And now they were just flat, slightly discolored photos. In a box. In my adulthood. Suddenly, my years in Loughborough had become real again. I remembered the day Dad took me to Woolworths and bought me Way of the Exploding Fist for our brand new BBC B Microprocessor with dot matrix printing capabilities. I remembered opening up a Griffin Savers account at the Midland Bank with a deposit of £1.25—and then withdrawing the entire amount the next day to buy “Dancing on the Ceiling” by Lionel Richie—mainly because I’d seen the video and thought it might actually help me dance on the ceiling. And I remembered my friends. I remembered my friends more than anything.

  Especially when I picked up a smooth and sleek black book, which I’d somehow overlooked until now… I recognized it instantly. This had been my address book. But a special address book. My grandma had given it to me on one of my visits to Switzerland, and I’d been inordinately proud of it. The edge of each page was red, and the paper gave a brilliant shine to whatever names I wrote in it. I would take the details of only the most important people I knew, and painstakingly add them in the best handwriting I could muster… including stickers and doodles for effect. And now here it was once more.

  I opened it, excitedly, and started to flick through…

  The names hit me one by one…

  ANIL TAILOR!

  MICHAEL AMODIO!

  Remember them? I did!

  CAMERON DEWA!

  SIMON GIBSON!

  Cameron! The Fijian kid! And Simon! The scruffy one!