Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play (26 page)

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?

“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

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
article 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.