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 Page B

reflected on whether I might have seemed a little over-keen.
    I put the phone in my pocket.
    Who the fuck was Rob again?
    Lizzie got home at around half past nine that night. She looked tired.
    “How was work?” I said.
    “Busy,” she said. “Really very busy indeed.”
    My BlackBerry was on the floor. I looked at it. It was still on Address Book. There was no tiny yellow envelope. No little
     red light. I had no messages.
    Lizzie looked to her left and clocked something.
    “There appears to be a large ladder in the hallway,” she said.
    “She’s retractable,” I said.
    “‘She’?”
    “It’s what we say.”
    “‘We’?”
    “Us in the trade. We tend to refer to things as women. I think it makes us feel more manly.”
    Lizzie smiled.
    “How was your day?”
    “Oh… you know. Pretty full on. I looked at the toilet for a while and on
Street Crime UK
there was this kid on a wall.”
    Lizzie looked impressed.
    “But also… I opened that box. The one Mum sent.”
    “The one full of handy things?”
    “Yeah… turns out none of them were all that handy. But they were…
interesting.
Stuff from my childhood. Photos and stuff.”
    Lizzie’s eyes lit up.
    “Get them!”
    “And who’s that?” asked Lizzie.
    We were sitting on the floor eating fajitas.
    “That’s Anil Tailor,” I said. “His mum used to force-feed me curries. Not that I complained. Although I was once sick in a
     neighbor’s bin because of it.”
    “Why’s he dressed as a cowboy?”
    “It was Wild West Day at school.”
    “And you haven’t seen him since you were a kid?”
    “Actually, Anil’s about the only one I
have
seen. Just once. For an hour or two. He’d stumbled across my name on the Internet and got in touch.”
    “What was that like?”
    “It was a bit weird because he was still dressed as a cowboy.”
    “Really?”
    “No. But it was good despite that. I was passing through Yorkshire where he was living. He’s an architect now. And we met
     up and hung out and it was fun.”
    And it
had
been. And even though we’d decided and promised and sworn we’d definitely do it again, the moment had seemed to pass. I had
     to be in London. He had to be in Huddersfield. I suppose we could have met halfway, but halfway would have been Peterborough,
     and meeting in Peterborough would have taken a friendship of epic proportions. We’d said, as kids, that we’d be friends forever—but
     time and distance and life somehow got in the way. I suppose as adults you learn the simple and sad fact that sometimes it’s
     just not possible to
be
friends forever.
    “Who’s Andy?” she said, leafing through a bundle of letters. “He liked writing you letters, didn’t he?”
    “Andy ‘Clementine’ Clements, yeah. But I’m not sure I ever replied much. I feel slightly guilty now.”
    “He
does
keep asking why you haven’t written back. Never mind. I’m sure he’s over it now.”
    I hoped so. Why hadn’t I kept in touch? I guess it seems friendship is something you just have to keep working at. Because
     if you don’t, one day you’ll stop getting letters.
    “All this stuff is great,” said Lizzie, studying an article from the
Loughborough Echo
about me winning a conker championship at age nine. “Granted, conkers is pretty easy. It’s just two small boys who’ve managed
     to attach horse chestnuts to pieces of string wildly flicking them at each other in the vague hope of destroying each other’s
     ‘conker,’ but still… it’s a sport! And it turns out you were good at conkers! Imagine how proud that makes me as a wife.”
    “Don’t tell your friends about the conkers, as it’s not fair on them.”
    “What else were you good at in school?”
    “Mainly spelling,” I said.
    “Spelling?” she said. “I’m better at spelling than you…”
    “I’ll have you know I am an
excellent
speller,” I said. “I can spell
all
the words in the sentence I have just said. And that one.”
    I was glad Lizzie liked