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

  Brilliant!

  An hour later and I was at my desk, typing an email with furious pace… the thrill of warfare was running high, and it was now time for action. Talking to Michael again had proved to me that meeting with him after twenty years wasn’t just about that one night in Loughborough… it was about starting something again. Something that could last for years… so long as we wanted it to. We could meet up and hang out whenever we decided. And I wanted more. I wanted to be able to say the same of Cameron, or Chris, or any of the others. But I knew my responsibilities, too. Which is why my email was to Lizzie…

  Dear Lizzie,

  It is I, your husband.

  (Dan)

  Now, listen, I could have talked to you about this tonight over dinner, but I feel it necessary to put it to you as a formal proposal, so as to keep things above board and businesslike. Also, we are currently within office hours and I thought you might like to maintain an air of professionalism.

  As you may be aware, I recently found an old address book containing twelve names. Twelve names that represent the best of my childhood. But twelve names that I’ve lost touch with.

  You will know from recent conversations that over the weekend I undertook a trip to Loughborough, Leicestershire, where I gained an audience with Michael Amodio, Anil Tailor and Simon Gibson. You will find them in my address book under A, T and G. Now, that’s three names done. Three addresses updated. I was just wondering if it would be okay if I found the other nine.

  I promise I’ll do it as quickly as possible. And I’ll do whatever you want in return. It’s just that, in a weird way, I think I need this. I’m not sure why. I think it’s to do with being… you know… 29 and a half.

  I await your response with interest. And crossed fingers.

  Yours,

  D

  x

  P.S. Michael Amodio helped me beat the Bald Assassin!

  P.P.S. You probably do not find that all that impressive.

  P.P.P.S. Actually, it was a draw. This is now the least impressive story of all time.

  P.P.P.P.S. The Bald Assassin is a child I play at Xbox.

  Minutes later, my phone rang. It was Lizzie.

  “So you want to do this?” she said, almost straight away.

  “Yes. I do. I mean, if it’s cool with you, and—”

  “You know you don’t have to ask me,” she said. “You’re just hitting thirty and you don’t like display cushions. Why wouldn’t you do this?”

  “It’s really just updating my address book,” I insisted. “People do that all the time…”

  “Not usually in person, though,” and I had to concede, she had a point.

  “Listen,” she said. “I have an idea. One that’ll make you feel better about all this and benefit us both.”

  “Okay.”

  “Meet me at Desperados at eight… bring whatever evidence you need to support your case.”

  Eh?

  “Desperados? What… that weird little place on Upper Street?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “But you hate spicy food…”

  “We’re not there to eat,” said Lizzie, her voice taking a chilling turn for the ominous. “We’re there to make a deal…”

  I was sitting, waiting for Lizzie, next to an upturned wheelbarrow in Desperados. There was a sombrero to my left, an inflatable cactus to my right, a picture of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown on the wall, and a bright yellow mocktail in front of me, so I think you can tell—authenticity was key. Desperados was a Tex-Mex I’d walked past almost every day since moving to north London, and yet this was the first time I’d ever sat in it. There’d just been too many quaint little coffee shops, or boulangeries, or places where they look at you like you’re mad if you can’t tell one olive from another. But this? This was all jalapeño poppers and deep-fried mushrooms stuffed with Mexican cheese. This was good. This was proper. This was somewhere I’d have come to if I’d fancied a really posh night out with Ian.

  I took a sip of my mocktail and thought about what Lizzie could have meant. A deal? We were making a deal? Perhaps now that we were married, I’d be allowed one small adventure a year. Or none! What if that was the deal? She’d wanted evidence to support whatever case I was supposed to make, and so I’d brought some with me. The only postcard I’d ever received from Christopher Guirrean. Pictures of me and Peter Gibson in the school play. The letter from Cameron in Fiji, complete with vague PO Box details. I studied them. And then in she walked.

  “Hello, you,” she said, stooping to kiss me.

  “Hello!” I said. “Check out my mocktail!”

  “It’s very pretty.”

  She sat down and ordered one for herself. Apparently, she said, Desperados had once been a place called Granita, and as such was perfect for making deals people could stick to. I have since looked it up, and consider her to be correct.

  “So, keeping things businesslike,” said Lizzie. “Let’s cut to the chase. You want to find your old friends. Why?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, it feels important. Like I’m getting older. Like things are changing. Like I’m going to be thirty any minute and I want to be like my mate Neil.”

  “Neil?”

  “Remember I went to that guy’s thirtieth birthday? Well, he was surrounded by all the people he used to know. Except he still knows them. I moved around so much. Mobile phones didn’t exist, or if they did, they were the size of dogs and children couldn’t even lift them. Text messaging was when you passed a note in class. And Bebo was the scary clown who used to come to assembly…”

  I was suddenly getting quite passionate. It was like one of those courtroom scenes in films, where the young lawyer suddenly starts getting all articulate and just.

  “And then you found the address book with twelve names…” said Lizzie, for the prosecution.

  “Exactly! The Twelve! The Special Twelve! I could call them Danny’s Dozen!”

  “If you use that phrase even once more it will seriously count against you.”

  “I promise I won’t! But as we know, I’ve already met up with Anil, Mikey and Simon. That’s three out of Danny’s Dozen in just one quick go! And that’s already 25 percent of the people in the book!”

  Statistics. They’ll always impress a jury.

  “Already, I’ve written to Peter Gibson. Already, I’ve written to Andy Clements. And the rest? The rest will be easy. I must be able to find Chris, for example…”

  “Which one was Chris again?”

  And cue the evidence.

  I held up a photo of Chris.

  “Chris was my first-ever best friend. He was the first kid I ever met at school. We hit it off straight away. We were these two tiny four-year-olds with Scottish accents and little blazers and ties, and we just knew we’d be pals forever and ever and ever…”

  “But you weren’t?”

  I shook my head, a little sadly. This would be a pivotal emotional moment to sway even the hard-faced and fictional judge.

  “No. I mean… I moved away from Dundee when I was about seven.”

  “Why?”

  “Mum and Dad moved and I decided I wanted to be near them.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “But we had such good times, me and Chris. Proper, carefree times. I can remember learning to ride a bike at the same time as him. Seeing a brand new TV show called The A-Team with him. I remember him bringing me a water pistol to make me feel better after Steven Bishop broke my arm. I remember agreeing with him that one day when we were old enough we’d both buy Choppers.”

  “Choppers?”

  “Those weird red bikes that make kids think they’re in Easy Rider.”

  This was good. This was setting the scene. Even the court reporters and the woman typing it all up would’ve been on my side at this point. I kept pushing.

  “And yet the thing is, from looking through the Box, all I’ve got to show for my friendship with Chris Guirrean—one of the first and arguably most i
mportant of my life—is a postcard he sent me when he was seven saying that France was hot and he likes dogs.”

  Lizzie considered this vast injustice. But it still wasn’t quite enough.

  “Who else?”

  I was straight on it.

  “Tarek Helmy.”

  I held up a picture of Tarek, in which he was smiling and waving. Who wouldn’t want to meet this guy?

  “When I moved to Berlin with Mum and Dad for a year, he was this supercool kid. He was a quarterback and one of the in-crowd at this American school I went to, but he was nice and kind, and one day he managed to save me from getting mugged by knife-wielding maniacs.”

  They’d actually been knife-wielding teenagers, but it’s important to heighten the drama when in court.

  “And that’s important, Lizzie. Who knows what effect that could have had on me? And yet I don’t even know Tarek anymore!”

  I now felt I was making Lizzie understand that this wasn’t “just” updating my address book. Making her understand that updating my address book mattered. And what’s more, I was actually convincing myself.

  “Who else?”

  “Lauren Medcalfe. She was a kind of pen pal. But I was never any good at writing back. Same goes for Andy Clements, although I’m trying to make up for that now. And Cameron Dewa.”

  “You’ve mentioned him, I think,” said Lizzie. Her mocktail arrived. It was almost as yellow as mine.

  “He was a Fijian kid. We were best, best friends. But then he went home. I thought I was on to him for a while today. Thought I was tracking him down. But the trail went cold. I’m still going to send the postcard, just on the mental off chance that somehow it gets through.”

  “To where?”

  “To the PO Box they set up about twenty years ago.”

  I laid the letter and my postcard down on the table and showed her.

  “See? People set up these UPS things all over the world, and get their mail redirected to their temporary home, wherever that might be. But as soon as they’ve found somewhere more permanent, they shut it down. And I don’t have his new address.”

  Lizzie was still studying it.

  “Sod it,” I said, suddenly realizing that was a bad example. “He’s probably moved house sixty times since then…”

  I’d made a tactical courtroom error. Highlighted the fact that this wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped to make it sound. I was about to say that if I really focused, really put the effort in, I might be able to find Cameron, but Lizzie interrupted, with: “Okay.”

  I didn’t know what the “Okay” meant. It sounded like “Okay—enough of this,” and I paused. There was a silence. The case seemed lost. I was about to take a large, sad sip of bright yellow mocktail, when she suddenly said, “I’m about to tell you something that will both delight and astound you.”

  I just looked at her. Maybe there was a chance I could turn this around…

  “But first,” she said, “the Deal.”

  I nodded her on.

  “The Deal,” I said, importantly. And then, slightly less importantly: “What’s the Deal?”

  “The Deal is this. Now as you know, I have no problem whatsoever with you gallivanting around, having fun. It’s part of you, and I love it. But I’ve also seen how, lately, you’ve been a bit… lonely. I’ve been busy, and Wag and Ian aren’t around, and that’s got to be part of why doing this appeals to you so much… but also, I am well aware of how you feel about… display cushions.”

  How did she know?

  “I love display cushions!” I said, defensively. “I love how they are there just for display and no other reason and how they are not for bottoms.”

  “I kind of don’t mean display cushions specifically. I kind of mean what they… represent.”

  I didn’t say anything. She was on to me, and she knew it.

  “Now maybe this is all to do with looking to the past, and thinking about growing up. Or maybe this is all just fun. Either way, who cares—if you want to do it, you should. But you’re going to feel guilty, and I’m going to feel knackered coming back late every night to a house that’s even more knackered than I am. So how about this… you can see as many old friends as you like, so long as you put equal effort into sorting out the house. The lights, the sockets, the painting, all that stuff.”

  The prosecution had made their case. And I could meet them halfway!

  “Today I commissioned the building of a small canopy!”

  “And played Xbox?”

  “Well… yeah.”

  “And googled Cameron?”

  “Yup.”

  “In equal mea sure?”

  I thought about it. I was being cross-examined. But I could get out of it.

  “Define ‘equal,’” I said, cleverly.

  “The same.”

  Bollocks.

  “Then, no.”

  Lizzie took a sip of her mocktail and winced. It was a rubbish mocktail.

  “Thing is,” she said, “I know you. And I know you’ll put it off. Now I don’t mind that. I’m Australian, after all, and we can put off even putting things off. But I am suggesting two things. The first—Man Points.”

  Man Points? What were Man Points? It sounded like a headline from the Loughborough Echo.

  “An odd job earns you a point. Fixing something, cleaning something, painting something—all worth points. The bigger the job, the more Man Points you earn.”

  “Where’s this come from?” I said, aghast.

  “I have four brothers,” she said. “Accrue enough Man Points”—I knew things were serious when Lizzie would pull a word like “accrue” out of the air—“and you can do whatever you like with a clear conscience.”

  “Man Points!” I said, but Lizzie hadn’t finished.

  “The second thing I would like to suggest is a deadline.”

  I thought about it. It was a compromise. And she was right. A deadline would be good for all manner of reasons. For her, it would mean a definite end in sight. A chance to indulge me, but not indulge me forever. And for me, it would light a fire behind me… make me do this!

  “When are you thinking?”

  “Your thirtieth.”

  My thirtieth. November 16th. It was perfect. It was absolutely perfect. The house would be done, and my twenties along with it. I would get to grips with saying goodbye to being a boy with a group of people doing exactly the same—and a group of people with whom I’d always been a boy. Plus, the DIY I’d undertaken and completed in the name of Man Points would help me feel like a… well… like a man. Prepare me. Lizzie had covered all the angles. The case for the prosecution rested. I’d avoided forty years of immediate manhood, and been offered several months of community service instead.

  “So…” she said. “Deal or No Deal?”

  I smiled.

  “Deal.”

  And a high-five in Desperados sealed it.

  I wanted to show her how much I appreciated this. I wanted to say something that demonstrated just how cool I was with our new way of life. I suddenly really appreciated all the things that Ian had made me so worried about. I could be ready for them—I would be ready for them—especially after this. I wanted to tell her that I was pleased she understood the old me, and that the new me was coming along. That once this was out of the way, I’d be so much more able to deal with ciabattas and mohair. But all I could manage was:

  “We should go home and look at our cushions!”

  “You don’t get any Man Points for that,” said Lizzie.

  Bollocks.

  “But in return,” she said, “to show you how supportive I am of this new endeavor—because I am supportive of it—I am now going to give you a gift.”

  I crossed my fingers and hoped it was a kitten.

  Lizzie held up the letter from Cameron and pointed to the top right-hand corner.

  “What does UPS mean?” she said, knowingly.

  “United Parcel Service,” I said.

  “Yes. But thi
s… this isn’t UPS. This is USP.”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “Psychic ability?”

  “No,” she said, patiently. “USP.”

  I looked at the letter. I reread the address. She was right.

  USP PO BOX 978

  “But… what’s USP?” I asked.

  “I have absolutely no idea. But I doubt it’s the United Service Parcel.”

  And then, suddenly, and with no warning whatsoever, I remembered something… or thought I remembered something… and my eyes must have lit up like fireflies because no sooner had I said…

  “Can I just…?”

  … than Lizzie had said…

  “Let’s go.”

  Lizzie sat on the arm of my chair as I fired up the computer.

  “For someone who claims to be an excellent speller, I find it interesting that you struggled to spell USP.”

  “I saw the letters and I assumed…” I said. “But I know I’ve seen USP somewhere before. And I know that it had something to do with Cameron…”

  “Maybe he’s psychic,” she said, and I laughed.

  I found the Internet and jumped in, tapping USP into Google as I did so.

  United States Pharmacopeial…

  Unique Selling Point…

  United Security Products…

  Universal Storage Platform…

  “There are too many USPs!”

  “But you definitely saw it?” said Lizzie. “You definitely saw USP?”

  “I’m pretty sure…”

  “Click on History…”

  I did.

  And there I saw it…

  usp.ac.fj

  At first glance, entirely unremarkable…

  But when you clicked it…

  University of the South Pacific

  That must be it! That must be the university Cameron’s dad moved to!

  There was a search bar…

  But would there be a Dewa? I typed it in, and pressed Search.

  And up came an article…

  Microcomputers in Fiji Education/1984 by Fereti S. Dewa, Suva, Fiji.

  “That’s Cameron’s dad!” I yelled, and Lizzie clapped her hands together. “It must be! Fred was what he’d always called himself in Loughborough to make things easier for people… Fereti must be his real name!”