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 Read Free Book Online

Howling Mad Murdoch as my best friend. Here was one from my first day at school in Dundee,
     complete with blazer and tie, as was the law in Scotland for four-year-olds. That was also the day my mum, in the panic of
     new experience, had forgotten to give me my first-ever packed lunch. The teachers, insisting that I eat something, had taken
     me to the canteen and bought me a plate of strange, unfamiliar food. I had never seen a boiled carrot before. It had been
     in front of me for two, maybe three seconds, staring back at me like a bald orange finger. Nerves took over. I couldn’t eat
     that! What was it? Where was my mum? Where was my mum’s
food?
My body did the only sensible thing it could. It vomited on Scott Butcher’s lap. He didn’t seem to mind, and we became great
     friends. It is the only time I have made a friend this way. If you try it as a grown-up, on a crowded tube train, say, or
     at a wedding, people tend to frown upon you.
    From Dundee we’d moved to Loughborough, and here was a picture of Mum and Dad and a seven-year-old me standing in front of
     our new house, looking all proud. My arrival in the East Midlands had caused quite a stir. For a start, as Ian would soon
     doubtless find with Chislehurst, no one had ever moved
to
Loughborough before. Added to that, the thick Dundonian accent I’d grown up with in Scotland caused worry and concern among
     my new neighbors and friends. No one had ever heard anything like it. A few people put forward the theory that perhaps I had
     been dropped on my head as a baby. Most horribly, when the school play came around, I was given the part of the amusing weather-man,
     mainly due to the fact that the Scottish weatherman Ian McCaskill was at the height of his broadcasting fame. The rehearsal
     went well. People laughed in the right places. But on the night, I would recite my lines to a hall packed with silent, horrified,
     open-mouthed faces. There was an audible gasp. A woman in the front row made a sympathetic face, as if to tell me how brave
     she thought I was, coming out here in public with such a terrible condition. At least one person held my mother by the arm,
     and told her how much she admired her for all she must have been through. “I don’t know how you cope,” she’d said, and my
     mother, not understanding, just smiled and said yes. The next night I was demoted, and put on as a mute, En glish footballer.
     And two or three months later, my accent turned En glish too.
    It was strange. The last time I’d seen these places, I’d been
in
them. And now they were just flat, slightly discolored photos. In a box. In my adulthood. Suddenly, my years in Loughborough
     had become real again. I remembered the day Dad took me to Woolworths and bought me Way of the Exploding Fist for our brand
     new BBC B Microprocessor with dot matrix printing capabilities. I remembered opening up a Griffin Savers account at the Midland
     Bank with a deposit of £1.25—and then withdrawing the entire amount the next day to buy “Dancing on the Ceiling” by Lionel
     Richie—mainly because I’d seen the video and thought it might
actually
help me dance on the ceiling. And I remembered my friends. I remembered my friends more than anything.
    Especially when I picked up a smooth and sleek black book, which I’d somehow overlooked until now… I recognized it instantly.
     This had been my address book. But a
special
address book. My grandma had given it to me on one of my visits to Switzerland, and I’d been inordinately proud of it. The
     edge of each page was red, and the paper gave a brilliant shine to whatever names I wrote in it. I would take the details
     of only the most important people I knew, and painstakingly add them in the best handwriting I could muster… including stickers
     and doodles for effect. And now here it was once more.
    I opened it, excitedly, and started to flick through…
    The names hit me one by one…
    ANIL TAILOR!
    MICHAEL