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

I wondered what Wag and Ian were up to right now.

  If only there was someone I could talk to.

  “So…” said Hanne, tucking into her bagel. “What’s new?”

  It was the next day and we were sitting on a bench in Holland Park. Hanne, my straight-talking Norwegian ex-girlfriend, worked at a radio station not too far away from here. Sometimes we’d meet up for lunch, or a coffee, and talk about the world and our places in it. But today she could only spare half an hour. She’d be meeting her new boyfriend in an hour just down the road.

  “Well,” I said. “Let’s see… Ian’s moved to Chislehurst, Wag’s gone on tour, Lizzie’s got a new job. That’s about it.”

  “And you? How about you?”

  “I’ve been to Loughborough, where I spent the weekend with chefs and architects and gypsy witches and time travelers.”

  “Was it a nerds convention?”

  Tsk.

  “It was not a nerds convention, no,” I said. “They’re old friends.”

  “You’re old friends with a gypsy witch from Loughborough?” she said. “How come you never mentioned a gypsy witch from Loughborough when we were going out?”

  “Well, the gypsy witch isn’t specifically my friend. It’s her granddaughter. And it’s more that she’s going out with a friend of mine. Mikey.”

  “Who’s Mikey?”

  “I knew him when I was little.”

  “Why were you hanging out with him?” she said, as if it was the oddest thing in the world. “Someone you knew when you were little?”

  “Well… because we were friends,” I said. “I thought it’d be nice to see him again. I mean, I wasn’t sure at first, because it can be a bit weird…”

  “It sounds weird.”

  “It wasn’t weird. He’s just a guy I hadn’t seen in about twenty years, and…”

  “I’ve never understood that. I’ve never understood this obsession with tracking down your past. Why go back? Life is about moving on. That’s why it moves on. Look—watch!”

  She held her finger up in the air and didn’t say a word.

  “See? That was it moving on!”

  “But sometimes you have to look back to look forward.”

  Hanne thought about it.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But it sounds like something Oprah would say.”

  Hanne ignored me.

  “People should move on. You know my friend Guro? She still loves Take That. She still believes one day they will reform. It has been ten years, and still on Guro’s computer is a Take That screen-saver. It’s like this Facebook thing. Facebook is ridiculous. People tap-tap-tapping away and tracking people down just to swap trivia… getting little messages saying they’re feeling ill or they’ve just eaten an egg. If I want to tell people I’ve just eaten an egg, I phone them and I say, ‘I’ve just eaten an egg.’”

  “Why on earth would you phone people to tell them you’ve just eaten an egg?”

  “That’s beside the point. All I’m saying, Dan, is when you look back, all you ever discover is that most of your old friends now work in IT. It’s boring.”

  “You do not just find that out. I’ve just told you. One of them’s a time lord.”

  “Is he really?” said Hanne, not sounding as convinced as I was. “And what does he do when he’s not time traveling?”

  “He runs a carvery near a motorway.”

  Hanne just nodded and took another bite of her bagel.

  “But he’s not in IT!” I said, rather offended. “You said they’d all be in IT!”

  “What about the others?”

  “I haven’t started yet!”

  “Ah, so you’re going to start, then. Because there will be others, won’t there?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said, a little too defensively, but we both knew that there would. That was, after all, why I’d phoned her and asked to meet.

  “Can I give you one piece of advice?” said Hanne, with great calm.

  I nodded.

  “Tell Lizzie. I know you and I know how you operate. Tell her now. Get it out of the way and if she says it’s okay, do whatever it is you’re thinking about doing. You see, that was the thing about you and me. It wasn’t the things you did that bothered me. It was the not telling me about the things you were thinking about doing…”

  Hanne had a point. She’d dumped me when I’d started an international cult and not told her about it. Yeah, that’s right. That old story.

  “So tell me the truth—you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”

  Sod it. I had nothing to hide.

  “Yes, I am thinking about it. And yes, I have been on Friends Reunited, which I’d previously been banned from for being abusive and misleading, and I had a look about. And yes, I am a nearly thirty-year-old man who might just be looking to the past to make sense of the future. And yes, I’ve just realized that that’s what that Oprah thing meant. And who knows—maybe you would call it a third-life crisis, but to be honest who knows how long any of us live these days? This could be a midlife crisis, a bloody great midlife crisis, for all you know, and…”

  Hanne looked mildly shocked at my passionate outburst. I refocused.

  “… and actually, none of them work in IT, since you ask. One is a famous singer, one does opening ceremonies for major sporting events, and two of them invented the glue on the back of Post-it notes.”

  Hanne just looked at me.

  “You’re thinking of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You don’t know what they do, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And you’re desperate to find out, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  A pause.

  “They’re in IT,” she said, and finished her bagel.

  Hanne’s lack of enthusiasm was frustrating, but what was really frustrating was how right she’d been about telling Lizzie. But who was she to say that all my friends now worked in IT? And what was wrong with working in IT, anyway? These were my friends and I was proud of them. A set of people unique to me, just as your set is unique to you.

  Discounting Michael Amodio, Anil Tailor and Simon Gibson, there were another nine names in the Book in total. And that made twelve names. Twelve names that represented the best of my childhood.

  I’d immediately sent off a friendly postcard to Peter Gibson’s old address, reintroducing myself and asking if he fancied catching up. And then I’d set about finding the other name that Anil had seemed so keen on finding out about. Cameron Dewa. The Fijian kid.

  All the Box contained from Cameron was a few pictures, a medal we’d both received after completing the Loughborough Fun Run in 1988, and a letter he’d sent me after finally leaving town to go back to Fiji. Cameron and I had had so much fun together, riding around on our BMXs in our little green tracksuits. Playing football on the field. Going to the Wimpy and McDonald’s and spending our tiny amounts of pocket money on sweets and Garbage Pail Kids stickers, until they’d been banned one day by Mr. Williams, the headmaster, for being rude and offensive. Mr. Williams had been a kind and generous headmaster, though prone to banning things on a whim. Stickers were banned, MicroMachines frowned upon, the local fair branded a “rip-off,” and then there was the morning assembly when he’d inexplicably decided to ban Wispa bars because they were full of tiny bubbles of air. Mr. Williams deemed this “as good as theft,” though he didn’t seem to mind eating Aeros. It seemed strange, but Cameron and I, being sticklers for authority, never again bought another Wispa. It can be no coincidence that just ten short years later, Cadbury stopped production of the Wispa altogether.

  The letter Cameron had sent me made no reference to the banning of Wispas, but did, instead, offer a few clues. There was a PO Box address set up by the mail company UPS, for example, which the family were using until they got settled again. There was a reference to his dad’s pla
ce of work, at the university. And a mention that they were headed for Suva. Cameron also mentioned that he’d just had a strawberry milkshake and it was sunny, but I figured I could probably put those facts to one side for now.

  And so I headed for Google.

  I typed in “Cameron Dewa” and pressed Search.

  Your search did not match any documents.

  Hmm. Okay. Too specific. And so began an hour of wading through website after website associated with the name Dewa. First off, the Division of Early Warning and Assessment. Then the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority. A 1980s Indonesian rock band from Surabaya named Dewa 19. A province of Japan called Dewa. But nothing to do with anyone whose name was Dewa.

  So I tried another tack. I looked up universities in Fiji. Hadn’t he said that was where his dad was going to be working? But there were so many of them…

  Central Queensland University

  University of the South Pacific

  Fiji School of Medicine

  Fiji Institute of Technology

  Pacific Institute of Management and Development

  … and not all their websites had a Search function.

  I’d never find him this way. I needed another angle… I found the Fijian Yellow Pages, and typed in “Cameron Dewa.” It came up with “C. Dewa—Plumber.” Ha, I instantly thought. You see, Hanne? Not all my friends work in IT. Some of them might be Fijian plumbers. But this plumber had a middle initial. I was fairly sure Cameron didn’t. I found a link to something called the White Pages, which seemed to be able to give me residential numbers, but how would I know which one was Cameron’s? There were no

  C. Dewas listed—I’d have to find his parental home, but there were no Fred Dewas, either… there was a Chetty Dewa, and a Dr. Seru Dewa, and a Kumaran Dewa (which made me wonder whether I’d been misspelling “Cameron” all these years—if I had, my one major talent at school would have been instantly undermined), but no Fred Dewas whatsoever.

  I was drawing blanks in every direction, and feeling suddenly a little beaten. I didn’t even know for sure that Cameron was still in Fiji.

  All I could do was write another postcard. At least I had the UPS address to write to. But as I did it, I slowly realized that surely this would have been shut down years ago. It was a temporary mea sure. Somewhere to direct their mail while they found a house. It would be nearly twenty years out of date.

  I sighed, signed the postcard, shut down my computer and waited for the doorbell to ring.

  * * *

  The Bald Assassin had just jumped out of a third-floor window, reloaded in mid-air, and shot me in the forehead from a distance of about a hundred feet. He landed, giggling, and then ran away, before the sound I’d been waiting well over an hour to hear finally happened.

  “Until next time, Bald Assassin,” I muttered, but he was off, annoying someone else and still giggling, so I switched the Xbox off and answered the door.

  “Well, the first thing I can tell you is this…” said Paul, pointing at the guttering. “We’re going to need to replace all of that…”

  “All of it?” I said, but what I was really wondering was why we’d stopped calling it “her.”

  “Yup. And also, see this?”

  He patted a part of the wall which looked exactly the same as all the other parts of the wall.

  “Ah,” I said, pretending to notice whatever it was he’d noticed.

  “You’re obviously going to need to protect this…”

  “Of course, yes.”

  “Have you thought of building a small canopy?”

  “Not that much,” I said, which was at least honest.

  “Well, you should.”

  “Hmm!” I said, tapping my finger on my lips, assessing the problem. “Okay!”

  Paul smiled. This was good. This meant he was now under the impression that, like him, I was a man of action, and that at any given moment I would happily sanction the building of small canopies.

  “I could do that for you,” suggested Paul, which was very kind.

  “Brilliant!” I said.

  Being a boss was easy.

  Paul left soon after that, having given me a revised quote and asking for a little more money, “just to secure the right materials.” The work couldn’t be started today, because Paul wanted to wait for the optimum weather conditions, and also it was nearly three o’clock and he wanted to miss the traffic. But I’d written him a check and he said he’d be back soon to mea sure up for a “really beautiful little canopy that’ll last for years.” I waved him off and congratulated myself on an excellent day’s work. It was a beautiful day. Just the right time of day to start work on the garden! The sun was shining, the birds singing in the trees, and so I went inside and turned the Xbox on. I looked at the socket that needed mending. No. Right now, I had to practice reloading while jumping out of windows.

  An hour passed. Maybe two. I was still sitting next to the broken socket with my Xbox controller in my hand. The Bald Assassin was still running amok, and had crept up behind me several times in the past few minutes and bashed me on the back of the head. It was becoming severely vexing. But I’d stopped playing. I was just sitting there, staring at the screen, thinking about what lay ahead. Or could lay ahead. And thinking about what Hanne had said. If I was to do this, I had to do it all. It would be no good finding just a few names from the Book and letting things rest. What would that say about the quality of the other friendships in its smudged and battered pages? No, if I was going to find a few, I was going to find them all. Cameron. Andy. Ben. Akira. Lauren. All of them. But it would take time. And they could be anywhere.

  I sighed. Was it a good idea?

  This was the question I was pondering as I simply sat there, quiet and still, staring at the screen. Staring past the screen. Staring past it so far I almost didn’t notice the small, twinkling oval box that had suddenly appeared in the top right-hand corner. I blinked until I could focus on it, and just caught it before it faded out…

  theblindsniper_1977 wants to be your friend

  Eh? Who was theblindsniper_1977? Why did he want to be my friend? Why was my Xbox getting involved?

  But this seemed to be in the spirit of the past few days. Maybe it was a sign. A sign that new friendships can be made. That perhaps new ones are what I should be concentrating on. Not trying to find people who live in Fiji who are also nearing thirty and knew me growing up. But new friendships, with twelve-year-old boys, on the Internet.

  Whatever. I clicked on “Accept Friend Request.” Maybe this kid had seen my screen name and liked it so had taken a chance. It happens all the time. I waited a few seconds, but nothing much seemed to happen after that. I was about to switch the Xbox off and do something more useful instead, when suddenly, there it was again… another oval, twinkling message…

  theblindsniper_1977 wants to play

  I was intrigued now. Whoever theblindsniper_1977 was, he certainly seemed keen on me. But it was getting late. The afternoon was slipping away and I’d done precisely nothing. There were still those boxes to unpack, and I should think about varnishing the garden table while it was still sunny, and then I’d also promised to give that banister a lick of paint…

  But one more game might not hurt.

  I clicked “Accept Game Invite” and sat back down on the sofa. And then, in my headset, I heard a familiar voice…

  “Danny! It’s me!”

  Eh?

  “Who?” I said.

  “Who do you reckon?” he said.

  I thought about it.

  “… God?”

  “No. Me! Mikey!”

  “Mikey? Michael Amodio?”

  “Yeah!”

  “But… how did you get inside my computer?”

  “You told me your screen name the other night when you saw my Xbox… so I decided to look you up…”

  “That’s brilliant!” I said. “Let’s play!”

  And so Mikey and I ran around a small room, shooting each ot
her, making each other laugh, talking about our lives. And it was just like the old days.

  “This is probably the first time I’ve played you at a computer game in twenty years,” he said, and he was right. We were the video-game generation, raised on Ataris and ZX Spectrums and Space Invaders, Pacman and Kong. In the old days, Mikey had been the first kid I knew to get a Sega Master system—a games console with all the high-tech power of a satsuma—and we’d spent many happy afternoons playing Shinobi, Bubble Bobble and Out Run… those were the days of bulky cartridges and unwieldy joypads… the days when the music CD had only just come out and Tomorrow’s World declared them “indestructible,” meaning the next day everyone tried to snap and scratch their dad’s new CDs and discovered that Tomorrow’s World was talking out of its arse.

  “Things have changed quite a bit since then,” I said, lobbing a grenade his way.

  “Yeah,” he said, a hundred miles away but right here in the same room, and blowing up rather dramatically. “But I was just saying to Nikol, it’s so cool we’re mates again…”

  I was touched. I had been incredibly pleased to see Michael again. And it felt good knowing that he felt the same way. Friendship really is a two-way street. You select your mates, single them out. But they have to do the same for you. Otherwise you’re a stalker. It’s a fine line.

  I wanted to say thanks to Mikey—thanks for being so open to the past—but he got his pistol out and shot me four times in the feet so the touching moment was sullied, somewhat.

  And then, a message appeared on the screen.

  The Bald Assassin wants to play…

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Not this nitwit…”

  “Who?” asked Mikey, exploding again.

  “It’s either this eunuch, or this American child who continues to taunt me. He’s brilliant at games, just like we were when we were twelve.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants to beat me again,” I said. “And to be honest, I should really be varnishing the garden furniture.”

  “Wow. You do sound old. One more game?”

  “He’ll only come in and beat me…” I said.

  “Well… maybe he’ll beat you,” said Mikey. “But you’re part of a team now… Team Loughborough… let’s get him…”