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

  FREDERICK: I am not 100 percent sure…

  DAD: You’re a spy, aren’t you?

  FREDERICK:… Yes.

  And Frederick disappeared the next day.

  Dad kept much of this quiet from me. Not on purpose; it just didn’t really seem to bother him very much. It was just a part of everyday life, becoming normal very quickly, in the way that filling up your car for the first time is exciting but soon becomes a trivial annoyance. But it was the night of the KGB invasion that made me think of it further.

  It happened like this. A month or so after we’d moved to Berlin, we had a new neighbor. His name was Bogomolov and he’d been a former adviser to Gorbachev, but had been sent away, as advisers sometimes are. He’d got talking to my dad in the hallway one day, and soon enough they agreed to play ping-pong together. The fact that my dad was playing ping-pong with the former adviser to Gorbachev (and that’s another sentence I can never say in queues) was enough to raise suspicions, and within a week a new set of Russians were living down the hall. But these were different Russians. They were brooding, and odd, and they wore all black, and despite their cover story of being experts in German, they didn’t really seem to speak it very well. I couldn’t help but wonder whether somewhere in the world Frederick had been promoted. We’d been tipped off by two or three people that the new Russians were KGB, but simply shrugged it off… until the night they’d waited for my parents to leave the house and get on a train. Thinking I wasn’t in the flat, they’d laid their hands on the skeleton key to the flats, and I’d heard a rattle of the door as a burly man tried to make it fit. Finally it clicked into place, he turned it and in he stormed… and there I was. Standing, like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, holding the Louisville Slugger baseball bat I’d started taking to school every day, and probably wearing the most frightened face in Germany.

  The man looked at me. I looked at the man. My grip on the bat tightened. An hour seemed to pass, but just a moment later he growled something in Russian that sounded faintly terrifying, turned and ran out of the door. I slammed it shut and looked through the peephole, but he’d gone. A second later I heard the main door of the flats slam shut too. He’d legged it. I had successfully repelled the KGB.

  Dad thought the man had been there to plant a bug, which I remember thinking was vastly unimaginative of the spy. Frederick would have probably pretended to be a Chinese ping-pong pro in order to glean his information. Now that’s a spy.

  I still have the Louisville Slugger, by the way. Because it was a present. A present from Tarek…

  * * *

  The JFK website was packed with more blasts from the past. Names I hadn’t seen or thought of in years, like its own private Friends Reunited. An alumni page gave me brief snapshots into people’s lives, through email addresses or small photos. But nothing seemed to have been updated since about 2002. It seemed Rob Busch was now a dentist in Miami. JC had joined something called the Ministries of God Theological Church in Atlanta. Jan Zimmerman now seemed to be some kind of professional hacky sack player in Zurich. And Tarek? Just the words… left JFK in 1992…

  Where would he have gone?

  A brief Google search under his name showed various possibilities. Was he the Tarek Helmy who was now Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine Division of Cardiovascular Diseases in Cincinnati? No.

  Was he the Tarek Helmy who was teaching at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran? Not likely.

  But there… at the bottom of one particularly long entry, was the name Tarek Helmy and four letters which seemed to strike a chord… BAHS.

  What was BAHS?

  I clicked the link.

  Berlin American High School.

  Of course! Our rival school! The one we’d always been pitted against in unsuccessful basketball games! The kids who used to wear the burgundy Happy Days jackets to our blue ones! Had Tarek defected? Gone to the other side?

  Yes!

  I found a sentence, entered onto a messageboard, almost exactly a year before…

  If you went to BAHS class of 94 we should have a reunion. Would be cool to see you again. Tarek.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  Tarek was doing what I was doing! Exactly the same kind of thing! Just one year earlier! Maybe he had an address book to update! Plus—there was an email address! Had I found him?

  I quickly started up my email. I would write to him straight away.

  But, as it opened up before me, something stopped me.

  The bing-bong of a new email.

  Dear Danny,

  Peter Gibson has sent you a message through Friends Reunited. Click here to read it.

  Peter Gibson! The day just got better and better.

  Someone had found me! And it was Peter Gibson! Peter Gibson who liked caravans! And said “Cowabunga!” And had an odd finger!

  I checked the message…

  Hello. I don’t know if you remember me, or even if you’re the same Daniel Wallace, but it’s Peter Gibson here. I was bored and looking at Friends Reunited, so I thought I would say hello… if it’s you, Hello.

  I laughed and shook my head. He’d happened to be looking at Friends Reunited, and happened to see my near-brand-new entry. He had no idea that just a week or so before I’d sent a postcard to his old house in the hope that somehow it would get to him…

  Were we all doing this? Were we all looking for each other now that we were approaching thirty? Were we all going through the same thing?

  I now felt like I was firing on all cylinders. Maybe today was the day I should try and find the others, too… Chris! Akira! Lauren! And then I realized that if I was going to tell Lizzie about my day, about the unrivaled successes of the afternoon, I’d better get on and do something useful. A deal’s a deal, after all. Hey—I could unvarnish that table (2MPs). How long could that take?

  I was about to switch the computer off, but paused for a moment, and then, for the sake of completion, checked one more thing.

  I made my way to Hotmail…

  Oh…

  Uh-oh…

  To: ManGriff the Beast Warrior

  From: Ben Ives

  Subject: RE: YOUR “ARTICLE”

  ManGriff,

  Sorry about this but the more I think about this the more I think it’s a piss-take. Can you please send me a photo of you as “proof”? Apologies but this is a bit bizarre.

  Ben.

  Oh, bollocks.

  Ben Ives was losing his nerve. Or… was he on to me?

  I had a decision to make. Come clean and admit it was me before he worked it out or stop all communication. Or push forward, and try my luck. And I would push forward, and go for the big one…

  But how?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN-AND-A-HALF

  IN WHICH WE LEARN THE POWER OF PERSUASION…

  “I’m not doing it,” said Ian.

  “Please,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Please,” I said.

  “No.”

  “But… please.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “One photo. Just one photo.”

  “Not even one photo.”

  “Come on!”

  “You do it!”

  “If I do it, he’ll know it’s me!”

  “What if someone sees it?” he said.

  “No one will see it,” I said. “I promise you, no one will ever see it!”

  “I feel very uncomfortable about this.”

  “I swear to you—it will be very dignified,” I said.

  To: Ben Ives

  From: ManGriff the Beast Warrior

  Subject: Photo

  Hello Ben,

  This is not a joke—please do not insult us any further than you have already.

  Please find attached my picture so you recognize me during our meeting.

  Grateful thanks

  ManGriff the BW

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IN WHICH WE LEARN THAT A FRIEND IS WORTH A FLIGHT…
r />   I’ll be honest: the day hadn’t started off brilliantly.

  It was Lizzie’s first day off in weeks and she was inspecting the work that I had completed on the house in order to make up for the work I had completed on my address book. I had realized this day was coming after my successful recent exchanges with Ben Ives and had set to work. I had painted the small bathroom near the stairs, and done so with great speed and enthusiasm. However, today, in the cold blue light of the afternoon, I realized I had painted the small toilet near the stairs.

  “I can just scrape those blotches off,” I said, trying and failing to scrape them off. “It is a standard decorative technique.”

  Lizzie had smiled and nodded and said nothing, and I silently hoped she wouldn’t notice the paint on the carpet.

  “And the paint on the carpet?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I was just about to say. And the paint on the carpet.”

  There was a pause.

  “Well, what about it?”

  “I was trying something. I don’t like it,” I said. “It’s going.”

  “I also noticed that the table outside looks… unusual.”

  I peered out of the window and saw a half-varnished, half-unvarnished mess. There were streaks down the legs and a small strip of wood was missing where I’d been a little aggressive with the scraper.

  “Do you like that look?” I asked, hopefully. “It gives it quite an aged appearance. Almost… like an antique!”

  I raised my eyebrows to show she should be impressed. Women love antiques! This, however, didn’t look like an antique. It looked like shit.

  “Well… I suppose I’m a traditionalist,” she said, kindly. “Either varnished or unvarnished would be fine. You decide.”

  “Right. I will give it some thought.”

  “Also, the shopping you ordered arrived.”

  “Good!” I said, relieved that there was a success story in there somewhere. “That is excellent news!”

  “Yeah… it’s just… well… did you mean to order what you ordered?”

  “Of course! I thought it through thoroughly.”

  “It’s just,” she said, ignoring me, “you seem to have ordered everything in catering size. We have a box of cornflakes the size of a telly and the ketchup won’t fit in any of the cupboards. It’s a bottle nearly two feet tall. The delivery man actually asked me if we were starting a business. It took three of them to bring the bags in.”

  I was never very good when it came to understanding quantities. The Internet had just offered me choices and I’d simply ordered the biggest. See? I’d have been a rubbish quarry manager.

  I needed to distract her.

  “The guttering is coming along fine, as is the canopy.”

  I pointed at the guttering and then at the place where the canopy would go in an extremely confident and able manner.

  “Well, when I say that, I mean it’s all still in the planning stages, really. Paul was here yesterday but the screws he’d ordered didn’t fit so he’s having to order some from a man he knows, but he’s away in Poland and they’re specialist screws so I had to give him some extra money for them.”

  “Right. And I see the ladder is still in the hallway.”

  “Yes. That’s true.”

  “Why… ?”

  I thought about it.

  “I thought I could use it for mending that broken socket.”

  We both looked at the socket. It was three inches off the floor.

  “Or I could just kneel down.”

  Lizzie said “Hmmm” and walked away, quietly.

  I decided not to mention the good news about Peter and Tarek.

  It turned out that Peter Gibson was now living and working in London as an architect. In London! And as an architect! Just like Anil. So far, only one in five of my friends were working in IT, and he had his own village in Fiji. Plus, two in five of my friends were architects: a statistic that only I—and architects—could probably lay claim to. I wondered again what everyone else was up to. Would Tarek have continued with the acting? What other voices would he have provided to the German cinema scene? As with Hamlet, where else is there to go once you’ve played Chunk from The Goonies?

  Peter was living with his girlfriend in Tooting, was enjoying the World Cup and couldn’t wait for tonight’s England game, and was as keen as I was to meet up. His email suggested a date a week or two away, and I’d decided that gave me more than enough time to either revarnish or unvarnish half a table, mend a broken socket and scrape some paint off a toilet. If only I could drink half a gallon of ketchup, I’d be straight back on track, Lizzie-wise. And so Peter and I had agreed to meet up.

  Right. To work. I found my way to a DIY site and tried to look up the best method of removing paint from a carpet.

  And then my phone rang.

  “For someone who lives in Chislehurst, you’re spending a lot of time in London,” I said.

  “Well, I can’t help it, can I?” said Ian. “Where else can I go to get dressed up like a bloody bear? And anyway, it’s the World Cup! You’ve got to watch that in the pub with your mates. Your words, not mine.”

  England were playing Portugal and the place was rammed.

  “I thought you said they had pubs in Chislehurst.”

  “Yeah, but not like the Royal Inn. They’ve got pistachio nuts here. And olives.”

  “Olives?” I said.

  Was this it? Was Ian joining me? Had his earthquake begun?

  “Yeah, olives. They’re like fancy grapes.”

  No, it hadn’t.

  We looked at the telly in the corner. Portugal had a near-miss and the pub screamed its relief. The game was already in extra time. We’d been late into the pub because Ian had wanted to stop for a Chinese lunch that he claimed I said I’d buy him for dressing up as a beast warrior. And we’d only made it this soon because Ian had seen some distressing vandalism in the toilets of the restaurant that had raised some controversial issues.

  “How do you get paint out of a carpet?” I asked, distracted.

  “We nearly went out of the World Cup there, and you’re asking about painting carpets?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “I dunno. Use a hammer or something. So I don’t need to ask what you’ve been up to. More DIY?”

  “Kind of. I met up with my old mate Cameron, too. The one I was telling you about?”

  “Oh yeah. Does he work in IT, then?”

  “He’s a Fijian chief. But yes, he works in IT.”

  “Who else?”

  “I’m in touch with various others.”

  “No one, then.”

  “It’s all coming together, Ian. Peter Gibson is close. We’ve got a date in the diary. And Tarek Helmy from when I lived in Berlin—I’m on the trail!”

  “Berlin? That’s where the final’s happening.”

  “The final what?”

  “The final countdown. What do you reckon? The final of the World Cup!”

  England had the ball and looked dangerous. The crowd reacted. But a brilliant tackle from Portugal and the moment disappeared.

  “And what about this Ben bloke?” said Ian. “The one I dressed up for?”

  “Ben Ives. I worked at Argos with him. My first-ever Saturday job. He spread a rumor that I’d undergone genital exfoliation and that my knackers looked like a weeping sparrow.”

  Ian spluttered into his pint. I thought it was in disbelief but it’s actually just something he does.

  “A weeping sparrow?” he said. “I’m not sure that even makes sense…”

  “I know! But it didn’t seem to matter! Connie from the stockroom couldn’t stop watching me walk about in case it was true.”

  The referee called time. Nil-nil. Extra time was over.

  “So when are you meeting him?” said Ian, turning away from the screen.

  “I’m not. I’m just pretending to be ManGriff the Beast Warrior who initially wanted to have a quiet word with him about an art
icle he’d written for the newspaper but who is now organizing some kind of animal poetry event in his office.”

  “Eh? So you’re not actually meeting him?”

  “Once I’m sure he’s totally gone for it and booked a conference room or something I’ll reveal it was me all along and the justice will be sweet. That’s all I need. I’ll give him a bell and we’ll chat and I’ll update my address book there and then.”

  Ian was thinking.

  “Doesn’t sound… quite in the spirit of what you’re doing, though…” he said.

  I thought about what he meant. He had a point. All I wanted to do with eleven out of the twelve people in the Book was celebrate. Celebrate our friendship and our childhood in the hope that we could celebrate our impending adulthood too.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “But a bit of revenge is called for in this case. Once I reveal it’s me, it’ll all be fine again.”

  “No, no, not the revenge thing. I think the revenge thing is good. Called for. You have to get him back. I just mean…”

  The pub crowd started to applaud. Initially I thought someone had scored. But they hadn’t. Penalties were starting.

  “You just mean what, Ian?”

  “Well, you’re trying to meet everyone else, it seems. The Loughborough people. The IT guy. All you’re doing with this Ben fella is phoning him.”

  “He’s in LA, mate. LA’s a bit further than Loughborough. Cameron and I met up in London. And I’m going to meet Peter here too. No—this is new media revenge. Something he’d never have dreamed of fifteen years ago. This is the right and proper way to pay Ben Ives back… and I’m enjoying it. It’s the best way.”

  But inside, a little pocket of sadness had opened up. I knew Ian had a point. The spirit of the activity demanded a meeting. But what else was there to do?

  “Do you want to meet him?”

  “Course I want to meet him.”

  “Then you should meet him.”

  Ian had had an idea. There was a sparkle in his eye.

  “If England win this game,” he said, pointing at the screen, “then you have to go to LA.”