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 definitely will!”

  “Right—to the bar!”

  The night was coming to an end and Tarek and I knew it. We were sitting outside at the Strandbar, yards from the River Spree, with sand underfoot and tropical plants all around. It was a hot night, with a happy at mo sphere, and the distant, irregular toot of car horns the only reminder that the World Cup had even happened.

  “Maybe we should get some bubbly,” I said, “so people could catch you rubbadubbin’ in it.”

  Tarek laughed and I looked over at his pals.

  “You’ve got a nice bunch of mates,” I said.

  “They’re cool. And Papo even said he felt a bit inspired to try and find an old friend of his. I said he’s not old enough yet.”

  I laughed, but I didn’t know what Tarek meant.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said, and Tarek nodded. “You mentioned you’ve been doing this too? Trying to track people down, I mean?”

  Tarek nodded.

  “It was all to do with turning thirty,” he said, and I kept quiet, even though all I wanted to do was shout “Me too!” But it slowly dawned on me what he’d meant about Papo.

  “I don’t know why, but every time I looked for someone, or found the old school website, I would think about turning thirty. When I found someone, or I talked to them, I’d always ask them if they’d turned thirty yet. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it was so important. But it started because I found this old website for my first school. There were about forty people looking for friends they’d known in the seventies. About twenty people trying to find people they knew in the eighties. But from the nineties there were only two or three. And that made me think, maybe people gradually want to reconnect with the past. It’s a cycle. It happens to nearly everyone. And I thought, well, maybe it’s my time. And it seems like you’re the same. Have you turned thirty yet?”

  “I’m a few months off,” I said.

  “I was too. It was coming. I turned thirty-one last week. Seems like you’re exactly one year behind me.”

  It did. And it seemed strange. I’d found a kindred spirit here.

  “It was a strange thing, turning thirty,” said Tarek. “I wasn’t scared of it. It’s just that ‘thirty’ sounds so much older than ‘twenty-nine.’ Your twenties are gone. That exciting period, that whole decade, when you’re becoming your own person. And now you realize you’re supposed to be your own person, and if you don’t feel ready, or you’re not sure you’re ready, it can be scary, somehow. In a way I miss being young. When you see a kid who’s seventeen, eighteen, on the streets, you can see what it feels like. Not worrying, being cool, being indestructible, and suddenly when you’re about to hit thirty you worry that all that is gone. And for me, that’s why I looked for my friends. It’s why I looked for you.”

  “You’d looked for me?”

  “Sure. I’d even sent an email to one I thought was yours.”

  This was incredible to me. Sometimes, in years gone by, I’d wondered where people were. Wondered if they’d ever wondered where I was. Maybe right now someone is wondering where you are, how you are, what you’re up to.

  “Who else?” I asked.

  “Josh. The three of us had so much fun together. It seems a pity all that’s gone, man.”

  How cool would it have been if the three of us could have gotten back together? Just for one night. One night in Berlin. That would’ve been amazing. And then I realized… maybe there was a way…

  “When Josh moved back to Colorado, he made me learn his address, like a little rhyme… the number of the house rhymed with the street name…”

  The only other time in my life I’d been forced to learn an address was when I was five years old and living in Dundee. A Malaysian kid named Zairul told me I had to go and visit him when he moved back to Malaysia. I promised I would and asked him where his house was. He told me it was number 3. To this day, a part of me still wants to try and find number 3, Malaysia. But how about Josh?

  “It was… something Drive. 635 something Drive. Or 195 something Drive. It ended in a five and it was a drive, and it scanned perfectly… and it was in Boulder, Colorado… and his dad had a weird name, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” said Tarek. “His dad’s name was Chuck.”

  “Chuck! That’s it! But what was the address?”

  Tarek shrugged, and said, “Why?”

  “Give me a second,” I said. “What’s the number for German international inquiries?”

  Tarek told me and I dialed it up.

  “What country, please?”

  “America, please…”

  “City and state?”

  “Boulder, Colorado…”

  “Name?”

  “Miller.”

  “Address?”

  “Ah…”

  “Address, please?”

  “Well, it ends in a five, and it’s a drive.”

  “Sir…”

  “Please! This is really important! It’s C. Miller, in Boulder, with those details!”

  “There are a great deal of Millers in…”

  “Please! I’m in Berlin with a very old friend of Mr. Miller and we’re trying to get through to him with some vital news, and all we’re missing is the…”

  “I have a C. Miller at Lindauer Drive…”

  “That’s it! Lindauer! That’s it!”

  I high-fived Tarek, took down the number and high-fived him again.

  “Shall we call him?” I said. “Shall we call Josh?”

  “Yes—but last I heard he’d moved to Missoula…”

  “Well his parents might have a number for him if they still live there… what time’s it over there?”

  “Morning! Do it! Call Josh!”

  I dialed the number and Tarek and I held our breath. The dull monotone of the American ring crackled slightly down the phone, as if to remind us just how far away we were pinning our hopes… but no one was answering… if only his dad would pick up, I thought… and then…

  “Hello?”

  Hang on. That wasn’t Josh’s dad. That was a very familiar voice. That was…

  “Josh?”

  A pause.

  “Speaking.”

  I couldn’t quite believe it.

  “Hey, this is… this is Berlin calling…”

  There was a split second where Josh may have blinked a few times before working it out.

  “… Danny?”

  “Yes! And not only me! Tarek’s here too!”

  “What? You serious? How are you guys?”

  “We’re great! How about you?”

  “Life just kind of goes on, man… how did you know I was here?”

  “We didn’t!”

  “But I just happen to be in the house for a coupla days, visiting my dad. I just walked in and picked up the phone. I live in Anchorage, now. Alaska, man…”

  What were the chances of this? Of me and Tarek being together after all these years, of remembering even part of an address, of phoning the number, and of a man who doesn’t live there anymore and usually lives in Alaska being there and picking up? It felt like it was meant to be…

  “What are you doing in Alaska?”

  “Just doing my thing, dude, you know me. I’m into cross-country skiing at the moment so it seemed like a good place to be.”

  “Where did you used to be?” I said, secretly relishing the word “dude.”

  “I was in New Mexico. The skiing is pretty bad there.”

  Same old Josh. Dry as a bone. I smiled. It was good to hear his voice.

  And then it was like he suddenly realized the odds that had been against us all ever speaking again.

  “This is… well, this is cool,” he said.

  “Here’s Tarek! He’s a rapper now!” I said, taking care to accentuate the double “p.”

  I passed the phone over and then watched as Tarek had a delighted conversation with a friend he hadn’t seen in sixteen years, and I felt proud that I’d been able to
make that happen for him, just as he’d made it happen for me by agreeing to meet up.

  When the conversation finished, Tarek looked at me with joy in his face.

  “He told me he’d looked for us both over the years on the Internet but never managed to get in touch!”

  “Seriously? I guess we’re all doing it.”

  I was starting to think there was something fundamental to all this. A human rite of passage we all go through. Maybe it’s just easier for us than it was for our parents. The world is smaller these days. A man from London can go to Berlin and phone America, all in the same matter of hours, and along the way reignite two separate friendships. Tarek agreed.

  “Maybe,” he said, “this looking-back thing… maybe it’s to do with responsibility. It can be scary. I mean, not getting married, because getting married was really cool. My wife being pregnant—that was really cool too. But the day your child is born is really scary. The day I picked my wife and my kid up from the hospital—that was scary. The fact that you now have a kid which is yours to look after for eighteen years… that’s terrifying. Plus our apartment was very small and we had no money whatsoever. But soon the kid becomes the only thing you care about. My wife, she had a better job than I did so she went back to work after three weeks, so I raised our daughter for the first two years. And it was hard, a lot of times. But now when I look at the relationship she has with me… that’s great. She’s a daddy’s girl. And I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  Suddenly I realized my own crisis of confidence had been the most trivial thing in the world. Why had display cushions and lattes and Latvian brunches worried me? Tarek had had a child to raise under difficult circumstances. That’s responsibility. And he was only one year ahead of me. Our desires to reconnect with the past had crossovers… but his reasons were more pure than my own shamefully trivial ones.

  “So what I mean is, it’s cool to hang on to your past,” he said, thoughtfully. “If you don’t remember your friends, you don’t remember your life. If you compare the things you remember with your friends, you can get the whole picture—who you were, what you were like, maybe even why you are like you are. Sometimes, someone else will remember something that was huge in their life, but which was tiny in yours…”

  I was suddenly reminded of something. Something I really wanted to tell Tarek. Something I wanted to thank him for. I looked around. Papo and BRD were deep in conversation. Axl was chatting to someone else. I felt I could do this without embarrassing him.

  “Do you remember,” I said, “one day after school, we were on the bus. I was heading home, you were going off to play basketball or something. And there were these kids on the bus, these older kids?”

  Tarek screwed up his face, trying to remember where I might be going with this…

  “… and I’d just got one of those JFK jackets. The cool ones with your name sewn on in silver, and the leather arms…”

  “Okay…” said Tarek, struggling to place the day.

  “And one of these kids was staring at me, and his friends were making jokes, and then when he caught my eye he pointed at my jacket, looked me straight in the eye and gestured that he had a knife.”

  “Ah,” said Tarek. “Yeah, that was always happening. They stole my Redskins jacket, too. A group of kids with knives. You don’t hear it so much these days. So did they take your jacket?”

  “No!” I said. “That’s just it! I told you what was going on, and you stared back at them, and they kind of backed off, and then you stayed on the bus with me for a few extra stops until they’d gone. You had to walk back for ages and you nearly missed your basketball game!”

  “It… sounds familiar,” he said. “I kind of remember it.”

  “But that was such a big thing for me!” I said. “I’d been looked after by my mate, in a foreign city, when I’d been scared.”

  “Maybe that’s what I mean when I say that for you, it was a big event in your life. And for me, I played a small role. But I’m pleased I could.”

  “Thank you, Tarek,” I said, and I shook his hand, getting ready to leave. “I just wanted to say thank you.”

  We hugged. I’d banished a demon. I’d become a Demon.

  And I walked back to Europe’s tiniest hotel room, happy.

  July 10th, 2006

  Dear Andy,

  We now turn our attentions to your letter of March 8th, 1989, concerning your trip to the Isle of Man and your birthday gift of a 14-inch Sanyo remote control teletext color television.

  To start with, I will say how pleased I am that you enjoy switching the subtitles on and off, and indeed that you do it all day. It is vital to have interests and hobbies, and I trust you have brought these with you into adulthood.

  Now, to me.

  Guess what? You might remember Cameron, who went to our school. Well, he is now a Fijian chief who has his own village.

  Also, I have just returned from a very successful trip to Berlin, during which Italy won the World Cup (if it is still 1989 where you are, you should put a bet on this straight away) and I managed to meet up with an old friend named Tarek. Tarek is now a rapper, which I think is quite an interesting job to have. I’d never considered it as a child, and now feel quite the fool. I hope you stuck with your plan to become a moon pilot.

  I still haven’t heard back from you, Andy—I hope my letters are finding you somewhere in space and time. You are nowhere to be found on the Internet (a kind of futuristic phone book… but you probably know that by now). Please get in touch!

  Daniel

  P.S. In reference to your P.S., you’ve only got yourself to blame. Your mum did tell you not to pick at it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IN WHICH WE LEARN THAT HARDCORE RAP IS SELDOM ROMANTIC…

  More than anything else, the “thank you” moment with Tarek was what came to define my trip to Berlin. I hadn’t planned that it would be such an important moment—I hadn’t even planned to say it at all. But I was glad I did. No matter how trivial or small that day must’ve seemed to Tarek, it was important to me. And it seemed just as important that Tarek should know that, too.

  I was happy as I rode the Heathrow Express back into London. And happy as I walked back into my house, to find Lizzie sitting in the garden. So happy that as I wandered up to her I started to serenade her with a song I’d learned on my way home.

  “Do you love me for my dough, ho?” I cheerfully sang.

  Lizzie looked slightly alarmed.

  “Sorry?”

  “Do you love me for my clothes, ho? Do you love me for my shows, ho?”

  “What is that you’re singing?”

  “I’m not sure what it’s called,” I said, “but it’s by a man named Axl who seems to be very concerned that his ladyfriend might not be being totally honest with him.”

  Lizzie now looked mildly shaken.

  “He’s just telling it like it is,” I said. “Keeping it real.”

  I continued: “Do you love me for my Rolls… Royce?”

  I struggled with that bit, seeing as how none of it seemed to rhyme with the word “ho,” and I was beginning to quite enjoy rhyming things with the word “ho.” But perhaps this line was based on fact, not rhyme. Maybe the song was from the perspective of an insecure baker with a girlfriend named Royce, desperate for praise for his Rolls. It would certainly explain his fascination with dough.

  “You have a Nissan, not a Rolls-Royce,” said Lizzie, interrupting my analysis of modern music. “A little green one.”

  “I was singing!” I said. “You motherbitcher!”

  She just looked at me.

  “I do apologize,” I said, and went and made her eggs on toast.

  I’d been doing my best to convince myself I was entranced by the beauty of odd jobs for the last hour and a half. I’d fixed the garden hose with a rubber band (1MP), I’d started sanding down a door to make it close properly (2MP), I’d put a call in to Paul to see when he could start work on the small canopy (he couldn’t
talk now, he was giving a quote to someone), and I’d even experimented with a hole in the wall and some filler (another 1MP). This last job had started out fine, until I realized I’d been inadvertently dropping filler between the floorboards (-1MP).

  All I was really doing was biding my time until Lizzie had to go to work. I’d promised to pop to the post office to pick up a form she needed, but the minute she was out the door, with only the slightest slither of guilt tapping me on the shoulder, I was back at the Box, tipping its contents onto the floor of the living room and diving straight in.

  I was over halfway through the Book, now, with just five friends left to locate… Mikey, Anil, Simon, Cameron and Tarek all had shiny new addresses in my battered old book… Peter Gibson and Ben Ives were located and locked-in… meaning that now it was all about finding…

  Akira!

  When known: Loughborough, 1988

  First memory: Michael Amodio’s Deadly Crane Kick to his head. Concerns: He returned to Japan. He could be anywhere now. Or, like Cameron, he could be minutes away.

  Tom!

  When known: Bath, 1991

  First memory: Him claiming his dad invented the Sprite logo, when, in fact, he was a builder.

  Concerns: I now know he was lying about the Sprite logo.

  Lauren!

  When known: Loughborough, 1985

  First memory: Receiving her first pen pal letter, in which she told me she enjoyed shortbread and the works of A-ha.

  Concerns: How do you re-create the magic of a pen pal?

  Andy!

  When known: Loughborough, 1984–1990

  First memory: Seeing his mother’s bosoms by accident.

  Concerns: Has he been receiving my letters? Is he annoyed at the sixteen years it took me to reply?

  Chris!

  When known: Dundee, 1984

  First memory: First day at school. First best friend.

  Concerns: He has disappeared. Completely. And utterly. Disappeared.