Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play (2 page)

For the time being, I’d been seduced. Seduced by a smart new area of north London. An area which was going places. An area
where people did brunch, and drank lattes, and dined at Latvian restaurants, and drove long, silver cars, and wore Carhartt
hoodies to make people think they were urban, and put everything apart from their house on the expense account. Where the
men wore media glasses and the ladies wore skinny jeans and ate croissants and read the papers on a Sunday morning in a place
with a battered leather couch before having a walk around middle-class antique stalls, with their thimbles and spoons. And
everyone was married. Everyone! I liked it, but I found it laughable—this row upon row of cliché I had inadvertently stumbled
into. What must they make of me here? I said one Sunday morning, over brunch, to Lizzie, my wife.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I mean, what do you think they make of me here?” I giggled. “Of
us?
”

Lizzie put down her newspaper, and I tore off another piece of croissant. I dipped it gingerly into my latte and raised my
eyebrows. I was a bloody
maverick.

“Who?”

“These married clichés,” I said. “These thirtysomething media-glasses-wearing clichés in their Carhartt hoodies and their
skinny jeans?”

“
You’re
wearing a Carhartt hoodie,” said Lizzie, with a smile.

“Yes,
I’m
wearing a Carhartt hoodie, yes, but I imagine
I’m
doing it ironically. Anyway, I’m
urban,
aren’t I?”

She wrinkled her nose.

“You’re not
very
urban.”

“I’m urb-
ish.
”

“You’re also nearly thirty and you’re wearing media glasses.”

“These are
not
media glasses. These are merely glasses that are
shaped
like media glasses. At least I’m not wearing skinny jeans. I
could
be wearing skinny jeans!
Then
I’d be a cliché.”

“I’m wearing skinny jeans.”

“Yes. You are. That’s true.”

I shifted around on the battered leather couch.

“Shall we have a walk around the antique stalls?”

“How do you ask for the bill in Latvian?”

The changes had started to happen without anyone noticing. But like the birds escaping the trees at the first fraction of
a distant earthquake, the signs had been there, for anyone to pick up on, from the beginning. Just small things. Like the
day I’d had to look up the number of a builder to do some work on our new little house. Looking up the number of a builder
is the first step towards actually
employing
someone. I would be
in charge
of someone. A
man.
A
proper
man, with paint on his fingers and stubble on his chin. I’d be a boss.

And then there was the morning Lizzie witnessed something terrifying.

“What are you
doing?
” she’d said, wide-eyed, as she watched me walking to the kitchen.

“I’m just taking this mug to the sink,” I’d said.

And then, as we realized what was happening—what that
signified
—how that was the
first time in my life
I had
ever
taken a mug to the sink within two days of finishing my tea—I stopped dead in my tracks and we both simply stared at each
other in horror.

We had felt the first tremors of the earthquake. It was getting closer.

Soon, the evidence of impending adulthood began to pile up. The fridge was our early warning system. Gone were the frankfurters
and processed cheese of just a year or two before—replaced by skimmed milk, and hummus, and baby carrots, and fresh spinach.
We’d gone organic, we were buying fairtrade, we had crisp white wine instead of cans of beer. Clubs had become bars, nights
down the pub had slowly morphed into intimate dinners with close friends. I ate low-fat pretzels with crushed rock salt where
once Doritos would have done. How had this happened? Was it the move? Or was it the fact that I was twenty-nine? On the brink
of change? On the brink of finally, undeniably, irrefutably becoming… a man?

But I
wasn’t
a man. I was a boy. I had a silly job, for starters. A job I’d entered into quite without meaning to, through a slightly
odd set of circumstances. A job which gets strange looks. A job I’m slightly embarrassed to tell you about. A job which changed
title every time I completed a new piece of work, but which, at the moment at least, you could sort of describe as “very minor
television personality” if you were being kind, and “quiz show host” if you were not.

I told you it was silly.

Since I’d started popping up on shows, asking questions and providing answers, my friends had started to think of me as someone
good to get on a pub quiz team—despite the fact that I have never in my life won a pub quiz. People texted me questions asked
by trivia machines in burger bars. Cabbies asked me to settle bets. I’d become recognizable on the streets, but only to people
who thought they’d gone to school with me or met me at a wedding, or actually
had
gone to school with me or met me at a wedding. I was
especially
recognizable to
them.

But it was fun. It was a different me, though. I had to pretend to be confident and in control and knowledgeable, but I felt
a little like a fraud. Sometimes I wondered if I knew who the real me was. But still, it left me with a great deal of down-time.
I knew in the spring I’d be tackling a big new project, so for now I was happy bumbling about, writing the odd piece for a
newspaper or magazine to keep the bills paid, seeing Wag and Ian when I could, and trying somehow to convince myself I was
able to handle DIY. It was time I should have been investing wisely, to be honest. And yet I was doing nothing to stop this
constant slide into domesticity…

So for weeks the rumble got louder. We’d started buying fresh bread. We’d visited a farmers’ market and bought some olives,
despite the fact that very few local farmers have ever actually farmed an olive. I wanted to talk to Lizzie about what was
happening, but she seemed so comfortable, so at ease with it all, so in her element, that it never seemed the right time.
She brought home display cushions. She bought some sticks which she stuck in a jar and convinced me were a “dramatic focal
point” for our living room. She bought the box set of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s critically acclaimed
Trois Couleurs
trilogy, which she assured me would explore the French Revolutionary ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood and their
relevance to the contemporary world, and I’d smiled and hidden the copy of
Kung Fu Soccer
I’d bought that afternoon in HMV.

But these were all foreshocks… mere tremors before the main event. The day the earthquake threatened its arrival proper was
the day my phone, sitting above the very epicenter of it all, jolted violently around the table, in controlled, mea sured
spasms. Either there really
was
an earthquake, or I’d had a text.

Come round to ours on Friday night! It’s a book launch! And we’ve got something we’d love to ask you…

It was from our friends Stefan and Georgia. Two names which prove, even more than a casual dunk of a croissant in a latte,
that we were now operating in a whole different world. Were we still in the East End, I have no doubt that that text would
have been from Blind Eric and Jimmy the Lips, inviting us out to throw traffic cones at cars.

The Friday arrived the way Fridays do, and we’d gone along to their vast Highbury mansion to find that Stefan, a chef, had
prepared an elaborate spread of unusual dishes. It was all in aid of his latest cookbook, and felt very fancy and posh and
middle class. Now, Stefan is a man who likes his food slightly odd. I know this because I once ate some soup at his house
and on the third spoonful discovered a severed fish head staring back at me. He is yet to offer an after-dinner counseling
service, but it can only be a matter of time before the authorities make it a legal requirement. So, as a joke, I’d brought
along instant noodles, “just in case there’s anything I don’t like!” Stefan laughed and I laughed and Lizzie laughed. I can
be quite funny sometimes. But then he looked a little offended and put it in a cupboard.

I opened a beer and found the food.

In front of me was a plate of odd meat. Stefan joined me with a fine wine in hand.

“What’s this?” I said, pointing at the dish.

“That’s donkey sausage,” said Stefan.

“Oh,” I said. “And this?”

“That is herring sperm.”

“Right. Good. Herring sperm,” I said. “Where did you find that?”

“Up a herring,” said Stefan. “We’ve also got some crickets for later. I picked them up in Beijing.”

“You have to be so careful these days,” I said, but it seemed from his expression that Stefan had actually picked them up
on purpose.

Half an hour later, in the crowded garden, Lizzie was being kicked by a small child called Owen, and I was finishing my Pot
Noodle.

“Georgia said they’d be over in a minute to ask us that question,” said Lizzie. “I wonder what it is?”

Owen had started to kick
me
now. I tried my best to ignore him.

“I dunno,” I said, shrugging. “Maybe he wants to know where I source my excellent Pot Noodles. Or maybe…”

And then I looked down and noticed that Owen was rubbing a donkey sausage into my shoes.

“Christ. Hold this…” I said to Lizzie, who had never held a Pot Noodle in her life before. She looked at it and pulled a face
that was completely new to me, but which I imagine must have been one of wonder and intrigue. I don’t want to make you jealous,
but life with me is full of magical new experiences like holding Pot Noodles.

I got a pen and paper out.

“What are you up to?”

“I’m going to get rid of
this
little numbnut.”

I probably shouldn’t use words like “numbnut” in front of five-year-old boys.

I wrote a message on the paper and gave it to Owen, who was laughing and pointing at my shoes.

“Give this to your daddy,” I said.

Owen beamed at me. He’d been given a job. A job, by a grown-up! Me! I was his boss! This was precisely the same innocent beam
of gratitude I could expect from the builders. He scuttled off to find his dad, pushing past Stefan and Georgia, who were
walking towards us with big smiles and rosy cheeks.

“Listen, guys,” said Georgia. “Time for the question. We were just wondering… and you can say no if you want to… but would
you two possibly consider being… well…”

She paused, and looked to Stefan.

“Being what?” I asked.

“Godparents,” said Stefan.

There was a silence.

My mouth dropped open.

And I realized.

Somewhere deep inside me, the earthquake had finally hit.

Godparents! Responsibility! Adulthood!

Forget buying focaccia instead of Hovis! Forget buying wheels of brie instead of Dairylea Dunkers! This was the moment!
This
was grown-up! How had I not seen this coming? How had I been lulled into this? How could anyone see me as someone worthy
of being a godparent?

We had just registered on the Richter scale.

All this had happened in a tenth of a second.

I looked over their shoulders. Poppy, their six-month-old daughter, was asleep on the sofa, a picture of calm and beauty.
So tiny, and so frail, and so precious…

“We… what,
us?
” I said, in disbelief, and not a little panic.

Stefan’s smile started to fade, but Lizzie jumped in.

“We’d love to,” said Lizzie, who is excellent in almost every situation, her job in PR helping her to put a distracting spin
on my rather surprised reaction. “We’d
love
to be Poppy’s godparents.”

Stefan and Georgia nodded, then smiled. And then Lizzie smiled. And then I pulled a face which I hoped was one of confidence
and adulthood—a face that said “yes, of course I am capable of looking after your child and rearing it should anything render
you unable to do so yourself!,” but which doubtless actually looked like I’d just trapped something I needed in my zipper.

And then we all hugged.

Stefan and Georgia walked away, arm in arm, under some kind of impression that they had just made a wise parenting move. As
they went, I realized with a sigh that during the hug I had managed to smear some Chicken & Mushroom Pot Noodle down the back
of Stefan’s shirt.

I grabbed Lizzie’s arm.

“Jesus, Lizzie, this is it!” I whispered. “This is how they get you!”

“Who?”

“The grown-ups! It’s like a club. We’ve been
selected.
”

“You
are
a grown-up.”

“I’m not! I’m a child! A boy! I’ve been faking everything else so far! I didn’t understand a bloody
word
of those DVDs. I watched
Kung Fu Soccer
when you went to bed! Sometimes when you’re out I buy Doritos! The other day I went on eBay and looked at
Star Wars
figurines!”

Lizzie smiled and touched my arm.

“You’re twenty-nine years old!” she said. “I’m pretty sure you would’ve got into the club one day. And there’s no crime in
the eBay thing—everyone looks back when they hit thirty…”

“But this is
automatic
entry! This is responsibility! Am I ready for this? I need more time! And what do you mean, ‘when’ they hit thirty? I’m still
in my twenties!”

“You’ll be thirty in six months,” she said. “But yes, you’ve got time…”

She smiled, soothingly, not realizing she’d just added to the terror.

“I’m here to help you, baby. You’re
ready
for adulthood…”

It sounded reassuring. The trouble was, when she’d said “you’re ready for adulthood,” she’d said it in the way that mothers
tell small children they’re “ready to use the
big
pot.” It rather took the edge off the whole “adulthood” thing.

And then I heard the rumble.

The rumble of anger, and danger, and fear.

It wasn’t the earthquake. It was an aftershock. It was…