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 was sure he’d got that off a pamphlet.

  “… and the local culture. The high street has several restaurants and pubs. And did you know that Malcolm Campbell, former Land and Water Speed Record Holder, was born in Chislehurst and indeed is buried in St. Nicholas Parish Church?”

  I shook my head.

  “I did not know that.”

  “Yep. It’s not all about London, you know.”

  I looked at him.

  “You miss it here, don’t you?”

  The golden light disappeared and the fairy on his shoulder popped.

  “Yeah, a bit, yeah. There’s only so many times you can visit an Internet café. Particularly when you already have the Internet. But how about Wag? Have you heard from Wag?”

  “I got a postcard,” I said. “He’s in Belgium.”

  Ian looked at the TV while Costa Rica had a near miss.

  “Who’d have thought the three of us would have such an amazing summer,” he said. “Me in Chislehurst, Wag in Belgium and you varnishing a table.”

  I suddenly got a little defensive.

  “I’ve told you—I haven’t just varnished a table. And I’m only halfway through varnishing it, anyway. I’ve been updating my address book, as well.”

  Ian wrinkled up his nose.

  “How long does that take?”

  “Quite some time, actually. I’m going some way back.”

  “How far back?”

  “Right the way back.”

  “To when?”

  “To when I lived in Dundee. That conversation we had—the one about being in touch with my roots. The one about only being able to go forward once you’ve looked back. It struck a chord with me. And then I found this old address book and met up with some old friends, and it hit me—that’s what I should do. See what the old gang is up to. See how they’re coping with being nearly thirty. Reconnect with my past. Like you said I should.”

  “I said that?”

  “Yes, you said that.”

  “It must’ve been that Taiwanese lager. Won’t you just find out that all your old mates work in IT?”

  “Why does everyone say that?” I said, outraged. “Probably 0.001 percent of the population work in IT.”

  “Well, it seems a bit odd to me. All this reconnecting.”

  “What? You said I should do it!”

  “I meant you should do things like stay in bed watching reruns of Murder, She Wrote and Magnum.”

  “But it’s been great—one of my mates has solved time travel. And at the moment I’m pretending to be someone called ManGriff the Beast Warrior in order to entice another!”

  “Well, when you put it that way, I’m a lot happier about the situation.”

  Poland scored again, and Ian went to get the pints.

  “I’ve done it, you know,” he said, setting them down on the table.

  “Done what?”

  “The schoolfriends thing. I’ve looked them up on the Internet. Facebook, and stuff.”

  “Hanne says Facebook is stupid.”

  “Does she?”

  “Why do you look so surprised?”

  “She asked to be my Facebook friend last night.”

  What?

  “Anyway,” said Ian. “I even met one of them for a drink one day.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Steven Macintosh.”

  I love the way whenever anyone tells you about someone they went to school with, they give you their full name. It is at once unnecessary and vital, conjuring up images and contexts and a feeling of childhood. And everyone does it. Somehow just saying “a kid at my school” doesn’t work anywhere near as well as saying “Gareth Sawbridge,” or “Michael Kirkland,” or “Sally Watkins.” It is my contention that if Jesus had gone to a British school in the 1970s or 1980s, the Bible wouldn’t simply make reference to Mark, Luke or John. It’d be Mark Witherenshaw, Luke Fielding and John Pepperwhite from Bethlehem Junior School for the Holy. Still, Jesus was a right one for nicknames. Just ask John the Baptist—he’ll tell you.

  “And what was it like meeting Steven Macintosh?” I asked.

  “I was quite surprised I went,” said Ian. “But I suppose I was intrigued. I’d tried once before to get in touch with someone, but they didn’t reply. And in actual fact, I’m not sure I would’ve normally. It’s a bit weird, isn’t it, hearing from someone you’ve not heard from in so long? You just kind of think, I’ll leave that friendship there.”

  I thought back to Cameron Dewa. Had he got my fax? Would he ever reply? Was he doing what Ian was suggesting? I had his address—I could always surprise him. Force him to meet with me. But he lives in Fiji. Doing who knows what. It would be a hell of a trip just to knock on someone’s door and ask if they’re coming out to play.

  And then there was Ben Ives. Would he have replied if he’d thought those emails were from me, and not ManGriff the Beast Warrior?

  Meeting Simon and Mikey had been easy—because Anil had been there. He’d given things a sense of normality. A sense of happy coincidence. We could all just pretend that I’d happened to be in Loughborough and kind of bumped into everyone.

  Maybe Ian was right. Maybe this was weird.

  “But did you at least have fun with Steven Macintosh?” I asked, hopefully.

  “Put it this way,” he said, taking a sip of his pint. “He now works in IT.”

  On the way out of the pub, I texted Hanne.

  “Have you eaten any eggs today?” I wrote.

  “What?” was the reply.

  “Oh, never mind, I’ll just check your Facebook.”

  “It is a BUSINESS UTILITY!” she shouted.

  “I suppose you’d say the same about your Take That screen-saver too.”

  Ha.

  My journey back from the West End was on a tube train packed with men with Polish flags painted on their faces and one lone Costa Rican. The World Cup was in full swing and London was a happy place because of it. At each stop on the way to King’s Cross, more fans would join straight from the pubs. Or, at least, more Polish fans. I sat next to the Costa Rican most of the way home, for vital moral support. I even tried to look a bit Costa Rican.

  At King’s Cross I left the station happy and lager-relaxed, though thinking about Ian’s experience with Steven Macintosh. Was that really what it was like for everybody? Did it have to be like that? My BlackBerry buzzed in my pocket, alerting me to new messages.

  I got it out and looked at it.

  New emails.

  The first made my heart leap slightly.

  It was from Ben Ives.

  To: ManGriff the Beast Warrior

  From: Ben Ives

  Subject: RE: YOUR “ARTICLE”

  ManGriff, hi. Thanks for your mail. But I am not sure a physical per formance piece by your girlfriend would be appropriate!

  LOL, sorry.

  B.

  Gah! Oh well—I would have to try a different tack. Ives still wasn’t on to me. That was good. That was something. I’d been slightly dispirited by my meeting with Ian, but at least ManGriff lived on. I started to think of what I could do next, but all thoughts of mischief left me instantly as I looked at the next name on the list…

  Because it was a name I just hadn’t been expecting.

  The name was Cameron Dewa.

  I immediately clicked it open.

  Daniel! Hello!

  Our housegirl in Suva forwarded me your fax! How funny to hear from you! Where in the world are you? What are you doing nowadays?

  I couldn’t believe it! It was Cameron! And he sounded pleased to hear from me! I wrote back immediately.

  Cameron! I’m in London! Where are you?

  The wait was excruciating. I began to walk up the street, towards home. By the time I’d reached the kebab someone had left on the corner, my BlackBerry buzzed with Cameron’s reply…

  Wow! I’m in London too!

  I stopped in my tracks. What?! Cameron was in London? Fijian Cameron? Cameron I’d
last seen in Loughborough? He was here? I looked around, just in case he was somewhere to be seen. That sounds stupid now I tell you, but how many times could I have walked past him in the street and not known? How many people might we know in common? Where does he live? What does he do? Why had we never met up? There were too many questions—too many exciting things going through my head! I hit Reply…

  You’re in London!? How come? Where?? Doing what?

  But I needn’t have asked. I scrolled down and saw his email had been sent from Dutch Rabobank, London…

  I dialed 118 and gave them the name…

  “I’ve got the number for Dutch Rabobank on Thames Hithe in London…” said the lady, and I hung up, because I had what I needed…

  Thames Hithe! That was… that was close.

  My BlackBerry buzzed. A reply. I was hungry for more news. Cameron! Cameron the banker! He could be doing anything there! A high-rolling financier! A dealmaker and a dealbreaker! A suited and booted head of international and legal affairs! I clicked it open.

  I work in IT.

  Right. Don’t tell Ian or Hanne.

  I read on…

  Hey—if you’re in London too, we should meet up sometime!

  I smiled, and laughed, but I didn’t reply. Because I was already looking at my watch and checking how long it would take to get to the river.

  I could be there in fifteen minutes.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IN WHICH WE LEARN THAT EVERY DAY, A MILLION COINCIDENCES NEARLY HAPPEN…

  I jumped out of the shuddering black cab and there it was: Dutch Rabobank.

  A large, glass-fronted building inches from one of the busiest roads in London. There were people every where. Important-looking people, wearing important-looking shoes, striding about, importantly. Through the windows I could see men hurriedly walking into rooms with sheets of paper in their hands. Women throwing their hands up in the air and talking loudly on their headsets, probably to other banks, in Tokyo and New York and Rome. They all looked quite angry. And I’d thought the Dutch were laid-back.

  I stood back and studied the building. So this was where Cameron undertook his IT work—fixing computers and solving problems and generally keeping the banking world from melt-down, after which I imagined dams would rattle and burst, buildings would topple and meteorites radically change course and aim for London.

  I’d moved with great speed and stealth upon hearing Cameron’s news. A quick trip home to raid the Box for a few items of Cameron-specific paraphernalia and then into a cab. If a meeting happened, and it was awkward, I’d decided, I could always literally pull something out of the bag, as a kind of Show & Tell element to the proceedings. But deep down I also knew that I was bringing with me proof. Proof of our friendship. Proof that we’d liked each other. Proof that we had a history. Just in case the new, grown-up Cameron wasn’t as keen on meeting the new, grown-up Daniel as I was on meeting him. I was, as you may have worked out by now, keen to meet him—so keen that I didn’t want to wait until we’d fixed a date. I’d decided that now was the time. Now was the moment to strike. But I didn’t want to just hang around outside his work and then surprise him. That would be too stalkerish. No. I had a far less stalkerish plan: an anonymous note.

  Yes. That was much better.

  “Excuse me,” I asked a man standing outside. “What’s the closest pub to here?”

  “That,” said the man, proudly, “would be the Peepy Cheeks!”

  “The Peepy Cheeks?” I said, slightly alarmed. It didn’t really have much of a pub ring to it.

  “The, er… the Samuel Pepys,” said the man, with a little laugh. “Calling it the Peepy Cheeks is a… kind of joke. We all say it round here.”

  Cameron must have the time of his life with this lot. But I didn’t want the man to feel bad. So I said, “It is a very good joke, and one which I will use myself.”

  He seemed to feel a bit better after that.

  * * *

  “Hi,” I said to the lady behind reception. “Does Cameron Dewa work here?”

  She tapped his name into her computer.

  “Yes. He’s in IT. Would you like me to phone him?”

  “No… but… could I leave him a note to collect?”

  She frowned slightly, but said, “Okay.” I took my backpack off, got out a piece of paper and a pen, and started to write.

  HELLO

  CAN YOU COME OUT TO PLAY?

  I’LL BE IN THE PEEPY CHEEKS…

  I figured that was mysterious enough to catch his attention, but familiar enough for him to know that this was not an elaborate mugging. And I figured that by not saying, “Hi! It’s Daniel! I knew you twenty years ago!,” there was less chance of him getting weirded out and deciding against showing up.

  I handed it over to the lady, who had an envelope ready, and I noticed her glance at it. And then at me. I thought about what I’d written, and realized that, yes, it did indeed sound like some kind of homo-erotic invitation. Perhaps this lady thought I had a thing for IT consultants, and spent the vast majority of my days traipsing around the banks of London tempting men out to play, based solely on the promise of seeing me in my peepy cheeks. I wondered whether I should tell her the real reason I was leaving an anonymous note for one of her IT guys, but she’d already popped the note in an envelope and started dialing.

  Christ! She was dialing Cameron!

  “Hello… Cameron? There’s some kind of… message for you down here.”

  And I don’t know what she said next, because I was out the door.

  But at least I knew he was in! I knew that Cameron Dewa was somewhere inside the building in front of me! It was exciting.

  But I didn’t want to see Cameron yet. Not right this second. It didn’t feel right invading his territory like this after so long. What if he got embarrassed? What if he didn’t actually want to see me after all these years? What if he thought I was someone else? I wanted meeting up to be his choice, as well as mine. We should meet on neutral ground, and the Peepy Cheeks represented just that.

  I started to walk away… but then couldn’t quite do it. Cameron was on his way. On his way, to collect my dubious message! What would he look like after so long? What would he be wearing? How tall would he be? Would I recognize him?

  I glanced back inside the building. He’d probably be there any second. I hid behind a lamp-post and started to stare at the people milling around the reception area. Maybe I’d stay just long enough to catch a glimpse. Long enough to make sure he’d been given the right envelope.

  Thirty seconds passed. No one had come down yet.

  Another thirty.

  Hmm.

  And that was when I started to drift off…

  In 1988, when Cameron and I were enjoying the heights of our friendship, the world was a very different place. There were no winters in the late 1980s… just long and hazy summers followed by Christmas Day and then the summer again. The Berlin Wall was yet to fall. Iraq was a country only four people had ever heard of, all of them living in Iraq. And Phillip Schofield was the most famous man on the planet.

  Schofield, Britain’s foremost children’s television producer, was every where. This was his world, run by him, featuring him, celebrating him. He was on TV every day. He was on posters on bedroom walls up and down the country. A typical edition of Fast Forward magazine, which I found in the Box and to which both Cameron and I subscribed as children, has no fewer than four thousand mentions and eight hundred pictures of Phillip Schofield within its 32 small pages.

  Fast Forward was ahead of its time, a publication I couldn’t wait for each week. With its insightful interviews (“If you were a biscuit, what biscuit would you be?”) and its understanding of the important things in any twelve-year-old’s life (Andy Crane, Timmy Mallet and the crazy new phenomenon of “mountain” bikes), this was a magazine it was impossible to do without. It was vital.

  It could do hard-hitting facts:

  10 Completely Amazing Facts About Nath
an Moore From Brother Beyond!!

  Number 4: He once came in second in a dance competition when he was 14.

  It could do heartwarming, celebrity interviews:

  “I see old pictures of myself and I’ve got green smudges around my eyes and a flick hairdo and I just scream.”

  That’s Kylie Minogue, next to a photograph of herself with blue smudges around her eyes and a perm so tight she could survive a fall from another planet.

  And it could do exclusive, you-heard-it-here-first gossip:

  “An exclusive bit of goss has reached our ears here at FF. Tony Robinson—Baldrick in the Blackadder series—has been involved in mega secret talks with film chiefs who have been so impressed with his role as Private Baldrick in Blackadder that they definitely want him to take over from Michael Keaton as the next Caped Crusader in the Batman movies!”

  It seems incredible now that that never happened.

  But mostly, like I say, Fast Forward was about Phillip Schofield. What makes him tick. His thoughts and philosophies. Whether he watches Neighbours or not (“Yes”). It seemed that Fast Forward magazine was certain that, like the Bible before it, it was vital to the state of the nation that these facts were passed on down the generations; that Phillip Schofield’s every whim and wistful glance down a lens was communicated to the children of the world, so that we may prosper and grow in a safer, better, cozier world. These facts… these were the things we all needed to know to survive junior school in the 1980s. Phillip Schofield trivia was like knives are now.

  But then, one day, a new man came into my life, in a way I just wasn’t expecting. A man who would become so important to me over the next year or two that everything would change absolutely. I was to become obsessed. Utterly and totally obsessed. Within a year, every inch of my bedroom wall—and I employ no exaggeration here—would be covered in pictures, articles, posters and artwork of him. I would have a number of T-shirts with his face on them. I would come to the conclusion that this man was the coolest, kindest, most talented and wonderful man the world had ever produced. Cooler, kinder, and more talented and wonderful than even Phillip Schofield. And even now, I do not use those words lightly.