Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play (32 page)

M
ore 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…

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.

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.

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?

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?

When known: Dundee, 1984

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

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

So they were the five I told myself to concentrate on. The last five of the Book.

But something Rapping Papo had said had struck a chord with me, too. Yes, so these people had a special place in my life.
The Book had, after all, come to symbolize the best of my childhood. But there were other people involved, too. Why limit
myself to those twelve? There was a renewed sense of freedom opening up inside me. My time with Cameron, Tarek and the others
had shown me that it was possible to not only revisit those old friendships… but to
renew
them. Reinvigorate them. So what would be the harm in saying hello to a few other people, too?

I’d had a twinge of regret that Grisha, the Russian kid, wasn’t on my list. That neither were Brian, or Amy, or any of the
other guys from Berlin. Phoning Josh had been a delight, after all… so where were they?

I sat down at my computer and typed a name into Google.

Grisha Kozlov.

I pressed Search.

Nothing useful.

So I did what I’d tried with Cameron, and typed Grisha’s dad’s name in.

I pressed Search.

I found him. I fired off an email.

And then I wondered whether that might help with the Final Five, as well… Akira Matsui had proved elusive. The only clues
I had for him were an old address, and a postcard, in which he’d said his dream was to become a medical doctor. Searches on
the Net for him proved fruitless… Akira Matsui seemed to be the Japanese equivalent of Brian Jones… rare enough that you’d
probably only have one friend with that name… common enough that so would sixty million other people…

So what was Akira’s dad’s name again?

Isamu?

I checked his postcard. It was.

I tried it.

Up came a page…

An Investigation on the Influence of Vitreous Slag Powders on Rheological Properties of Fresh Concrete
Isamu Matsui

Table 1. X-ray diffraction (CuKa) shows that BFS and PS have similar XRD patterns, and…

I gulped. Reading about vitreous slag powders and fresh concrete wasn’t really my forte. Another nail in the coffin of falling
back on quarry manager as a trade. But I scanned through, right to the bottom, where I found a footnote, telling me that Mr.
Matsui had, in 1995 at least, been teaching at the College of Industrial Technology at Nihon University… a quick hop to their
website and moments later…

I had his email…

I pressed Send & Receive and heard my email whoosh away, on its way to Japan… but as it set off, another arrived…

Hi Daniel,

So nice to hear from you after so many years!

I attach Grisha’s email address at the bottom of my mail! He now lives in Tel Aviv, learning Electrical Engineering. In addition,
he is working at Intel.

Bye!

M

P.S. You should know that he has recently changed his name to Ben Berlin.

I laughed, as much out of delight at the speed of the reconnection as at the fact that Grisha had apparently and inexplicably
changed his name to “Ben Berlin.” Oh, and I also liked the fact that he was now working in IT.

But Tel Aviv! How cool was that? It was incredible to me how my friends had traveled, and once again I wished I could map
out a route of their movements over the years… a vast map with lines darting across the globe, like a map of airline routes
from the seventies to today…

And so I typed in more names, almost at random… Many I could find nothing for, or just mere mentions that they’d been in a
place or done a thing but after that the trail ran cold… but for others—so
many
others—I was tracking and tracing with great success. I was on fire. If I discovered a technique for finding one person,
I’d try it with the others—and, crucially, for the Big Five.

A page on MySpace for someone I only barely knew at school linked me immediately to the page of someone I’d known very well,
but had never seen again. Quickly, I made my own MySpace page, for the sole purpose of saying hello. And so I typed another
name into the site—someone else I hadn’t seen in around twenty-five years—Eilidh McLaughlin.

Eilidh was a little girl I used to hang around with in Dundee when I was four… we did everything together. When a kid down
my road broke my arm, Eilidh made sure to break her arm by falling off a swing just a week later. And within minutes, thanks
to MySpace, I knew where she was (Glasgow), what she was doing (translating Gaelic programs for the BBC), and even what she
looked like (the same, pretty much, and not much bigger). Underneath her photo was the word “Online!,” and I smiled in disbelief.
Right now we were both online, both looking at a screen,
both on the same website
… literally connected to each other… I fired off a hello, and she wrote back, delighted…

I found a number for Big Al through my friend Little Dan, and sent out a text… Al was now apparently a policeman in Liverpool,
and was probably on duty, so I held out no great hopes—but moments later, I had my reply…

Danny! Hey mate how are you? I saw you on some weird TV program recently—what’s all that about? What’s your address?

I texted him back, and he said:

I’m getting married! Hope you can come to the wedding!

From never seeing the man to being invited to his wedding—reintroduced to the
bosom
of his friendship!—and with just the press of a few buttons in between. I swelled with pride, and texted back:

Wow! Of course!

This
was what it was all about.

I pressed on. I found out that my mate Bob from university was now teaching English in Osaka. That my friend Rob from Bath—who
I’d met while doing work experience at school—was now editing a magazine in Sydney. Brian from Berlin was a dad and working
in Aurora. And Amy was in Washington.

I don’t really need to tell you what Amy was doing.

Okay, then.

She was working in IT.

I fired off email after email, referring from time to time to the contents of the Box, finding clues, and tidbits, and things
I might try… I found a small note from Leanne Davis, a girl I’d been “going out with” before moving to Berlin—when who you
were going out with was decided by their friends and consisted of awkwardly drinking a milkshake at the Wimpy once a week.
I looked at her name and realized that, technically, we’d never actually broken up. I’d just moved to Berlin and gradually
the letters had stopped. I was horrified. We’d never ended it! For nearly two decades I’d been going out with a thirteen-year-old
girl! Obviously, she may have grown up just as I had, but what if she hadn’t? The scandal! A quick look around revealed not
just her picture and her location, but her company’s name and her position as head of corporate affairs!

And then I found Alex Chinyemba… Alex was a kid from Zimbabwe I’d known when I was about ten… we’d spent a childhood holiday
together in a disused water mill up in the highlands of Scotland, and gone climbing and horse-riding and eaten sweets and
burned pizza. We’d also spent a day at a local water park, when we’d told girls he was an African prince and charged one of
them 50p to touch his hair. He’d popped into my head, and within ten minutes I’d found a clue… one phone call to an East Midlands
karate center later, and I’d found out that he was now an estate agent with four kids and taught karate on the side. We talked
and laughed, and six minutes later he texted me a photograph of himself with a large mustache. Four kids and a mustache! Here
was a man comfortable with turning thirty.

Plus, he agreed to help me work on my block.

And it didn’t stop there.

An inspirational moment had reminded me of a way of finding Tom… his dad, the builder that Tom had insisted had invented the
Sprite logo, had founded his own company… could they possibly have a…

They did!

The website proudly proclaimed they were part of the Federation of Master Builders, but, more worryingly, also provided a
definition of what a builder is…

Builder n. One who builds; one engaged in the trade of construction

Just what kind of market was this website catering to? If someone doesn’t know what a builder is, how did they even manage
to turn the computer on? Actually, I thought, maybe I should show this to Paul.

There was a
Contact Us!
button, and I rushed out an email to Tom. The day was just getting better and better. I asked whoever got these emails to
forward mine to Tom, saying it would be great to see him! That I’d been revisiting my childhood! That I wanted to update my
address book! That we should meet up, hang out, finally get together! That I’d love to see him! That I hoped I wasn’t coming
on too strong! This could be another address updated!