Friends Like These

by Danny Wallace

  Behind me, all I could hear was the whirr of CCTV cameras as they rotated to catch me.

  Inside, a small internal voice was shouting, ‘PEG IT!’

  I’m ready to admit something to you now. Something I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do. But telling you about the Cameron days makes me think it’s all right…

  There was one extra name in that address book, which I didn’t mention before. One extra name I’d included on this unofficial list of great mates. One extra name I’d put down there, along with a picture and an address. An address I had written to on more than one occasion.

  The World of Michael Jackson

  PO BOX 92873

  Encino, CA

  USA

  I had written to Michael Jackson to invite him to Loughborough. It would be the school play soon, and I’d thought perhaps he might like a free ticket (I know people). As it turned out, the closest I would ever get to Michael Jackson was walking through the town centre one evening and experiencing the heart-stopping delight of spotting him in the bargain bookshop on the corner. ‘There he is!’ I thought. ‘He’s in Thompson’s Bargain Books! He must have read my letter and decided he needed to see The Princess and the Pea!’ And as I walked closer, and took in the cruel and devastating truth – that this was just a waxy cardboard cut-out to promote his new book Moonwalker – my heart hit the floor, and I felt more disappointed than I thought it possible to feel. I boycotted Thompson’s soon after. Mainly because they told me I couldn’t have the cut-out.

  The obsession had started after Cameron had been round my house and suddenly pulled a battered C-60 tape from the trousers of his turquoise cotton tracksuit.

  ‘This is my brother’s,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of Thriller?’

  I shook my head. I wasn’t all that interested. My main interest was recording the theme tunes to my favourite shows by placing a tape recorder next to the telly and hitting Record and Play at precisely the right moment to avoid the announcer’s voice. I had The A-Team, The Littlest Hobo, Grange Hill, Streethawk, Wac-a-day, Airwolf, everything. I had no time for this other, childish stuff.

  But then Cameron flipped open the cassette player and pressed Play. And in that moment everything changed. This was the most incredible music I had ever heard! It told a story! There were sound effects! What the hell was it?

  ‘There’s a video,’ said Cameron.

  ‘A video?’ I’d said, wide-eyed.

  ‘My brother has it. All these dead people come alive and they start dancing. Like this.’

  He did a little zombie dance.

  This sounded too incredible to be true.

  ‘And Michael Jackson turns into a wolf and he starts dancing like this.’

  He did another little dance.

  I wanted to do that! I wanted to dance like a little wolf!

  ‘And there’s this other album,’ he said. ‘Called Bad.’

  ‘Why’s he called it Bad?’ I asked.

  ‘Because Bad means Good,’ said Cameron, wisely.

  ‘Oh!’ I said. That was clever.

  Within a matter of weeks, I had become unhealthily obsessed with Michael Jackson. The letters I wrote him talked openly of my admiration for his charity work. I dissected his lyrics and explained what they meant to me – the twelve-year-old boy in late 1980s Leicestershire. I asked after his chimp, Bubbles, and told him I hoped his hair had stopped hurting after he got burnt doing that Pepsi ad. And I loved the fact that Michael Jackson loved children. I mean, he really seemed to love them. There they were in his videos. In his films. Round his house. He was a grown man who seemed to prefer hanging out with boys my age! That was brilliant!

  My mum and dad didn’t seem to share that view, but what did they know? They didn’t even know his favourite colour, or all the words to ‘Liberian Girl’! How was I supposed to take them seriously? Losers!

  But me and Cameron knew all that stuff. We were Loughborough’s number one Michael Jackson obsessives. And we’d always said that one day, when we were old enough and able to, we’d go and see the man, for real. It seemed an impossible dream. And, like most impossible dreams, it never, ever stood a chance of happening.

  I sipped nervously at my pint. The Peepy Cheeks was filling up with the post-office crowd. By which I mean a crowd that had just been in the office, not a room full of postmen.

  Around me were men with shiny hair and tailored suits, talking loudly and laughing at the slightest thing. One of them banged the table every time he spoke, apparently on a one-man mission to turn the word ‘Banker’ into rhyming slang.

  I had a seat near the entrance, so I could look out for Cameron and prepare myself for his arrival. I honestly didn’t know how he’d react to me just turning up and asking if he could come out to play. Maybe he had things to do tonight. Maybe he had a family, or had to pick someone up from school. Maybe he was allergic to pubs, or had a history of violently assaulting people who surprised him. I just didn’t know what Cameron would be like now. I only knew what he used to be like.

  Twenty minutes passed, and there was still no sign of him.

  Then thirty.

  Hope seemed to be fading. But then, maybe Cameron was still running on Fiji Time. Cameron had always said he ran on that. This meant that he could be as late as he wanted for anything he chose and simply blame it on the people of Fiji. I had a feeling this only worked if you were actually Fijian yourself. It would be difficult for me to be late to a job interview and then blame it on the Swedes. But Cameron embraced his excuse on a near-daily basis. When I’d made him promise and swear to meet me at two o’clock outside the Curzon to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he’d finally wandered in at around four, and caught the last five minutes.

  ‘At least I got to see who framed him,’ he’d said. ‘That’s the important thing.’

  And I suppose he was right.

  And then, with no warning whatsoever, in he walked.

  He saw me and pointed.

  ‘You!’ he said.

  Cameron was unmistakably Cameron.

  He was taller, and broader, and wider… but he was Cameron.

  ‘I had no idea you were trying to track me down!’ he said, settling into his seat. ‘I only found out from that fax! They forwarded it to me in London, and I said, oh my gosh, I remember this guy!, and I told my wife, I said, I was at this guy’s house practically every day when I was a kid! So I thought I’d give it a shot and reply.’

  ‘Did you ever try and look me up as the years went by?’ I said, with a little hope in my eyes.

  ‘No,’ said Cameron.

  Oh.

  ‘But every so often I wondered where you were in the world, if that counts. I think we all wonder where our friends are now. It did cross my mind that perhaps these days you were a psychopath, leaving dodgy notes for me around the world. But life’s about risks. I figured it was worth the risk.’

  I took that as a compliment. It was official: meeting me was worth risking murder. It’s not something I get a lot.

  ‘So where do you live now?’ I asked.

  ‘In Essex,’ he said. ‘I get the train here every day, quite early, and then—’

  Hang on…

  ‘That goes through Bow! I think that goes past my old flat!’

  So Cameron had been closer than we’d ever thought. The trains which run past my old flat run within two metres of it. That meant that for the past few years, Cameron and I had been within spitting distance, every day, twice a day. Yeah, so only for a split second each time – but that’s a lot of split seconds. And that’s a lot of spit, over not much distance. The tracks must’ve been soaked.

  A strange thought occurred… I wished I had a map. I wished I could somehow trace the lines of people’s movements through the years… not just the movements of their daily routine, but the times they ventured out of it. The times we might just have bumped into each other. The times that coincidences are made of. Cameron’s daily routine had brought him closer to me than I’d ever thoug
ht could be likely – but who knew how many times I’d walked past him as he sat in a café, or a pub? What if that was true of the others? What if I’d walked past Akira Matsui, or Peter Gibson, or Lauren Medcalfe on my way to meet another, newer friend? What if I’d been on holiday at the same time and in the same place as Ben Ives? Or at a gig? Or in the same cinema? What if tonight I would walk past Christopher Guirrean without even realising it – without even looking up to check? It suddenly struck me that every day a million coincidences nearly happen.

  ‘It’s a small world,’ said Cameron. ‘But it feels pretty big when you’re a kid. Hey – are you still into MJ?’

  ‘Michael Jackson?’ I said. ‘No. That sort of faded away. You?’

  ‘No. Michael Jordan took over. When we went back to Fiji I got kind of obsessed with basketball. I had to go to a Chinese school at first, and they didn’t really have a natural talent for rugby, so all we did was play basketball, and I loved it. I ended up playing for Fiji.’

  ‘You played basketball for Fiji?’ I said, amazed. ‘Seriously?’

  It made my North Leicestershire Under-Tens Boys Swimming Championship seem almost like some kind of regional sporting award for children.

  ‘Yeah… we played against America, against Australia, against New Zealand… I wound up scoring nine three-pointers in the game before the world final, but then sprained my ankle so couldn’t go through… I was pretty annoyed.’

  ‘But still! You played for a national team! You played for your country!’

  Cameron looked proud.

  ‘I suppose.’

  And then he looked even prouder.

  ‘I was also in a Coke ad.’

  ‘You what?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I was in an advert for Coca-Cola.’

  This seemed to me to be the whole point of something like Friends Reunited. Why write ‘I enjoy peanuts and am unmarried’ when you can write ‘I played basketball for Fiji and advertised Coca-Cola’?

  ‘It was when they had their new plastic bottles out, and they didn’t want to frighten everyone with them by just putting them in the shops.’

  ‘That would have been very frightening.’

  ‘So they did this advertising campaign. I happened to be walking by the studio, when someone I knew ran out and said, “Hey – what are you doing for the next hour or so? How would you like fifty bucks and some free Coke?”’

  That seemed to pretty much sum up the advertising industry.

  ‘I had to run along a beach with a girl and then stop and drink some Coke. They expected you to hold the bottle in the air miles away from your mouth and then pour it in for thirty seconds, nonstop. I kept getting it down my top, or my mouth would fill up and it would go down my chin. I got it in my eyes at one point and then coughed and sprayed the girl with Coke. It wasn’t the look they were going for.’

  ‘Did you manage it?’

  ‘I went through nine bottles. I was getting shaky from all the caffeine and my tummy was full of liquid. In the end they made the girl do it instead. She did it first time.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘When I saw the ad I noticed that all the foundation they’d made me wear had mixed with the Coke and made me look all lumpy. I looked like one of the zombies from “Thriller”.’

  ‘Still. Another ambition realised.’

  ‘It was as close to being Michael Jackson as I ever came. I remember we always said that one day we’d get to see him.’

  ‘Yeah. But then you grow up.’

  ‘Yeah. But then you grow up.’

  Cameron was now married, to a Fijian girl called Nadine, who he’d met at school. Nothing had happened at first – she was concentrating on her band, 4Jams, he was playing basketball with a load of Chinese blokes. And then, while working in a factory, they’d finally fallen in love. Cameron found work as a piano tuner, Nadine found part-time work here and there, and one day they’d upped and moved to London. It was a happy story. But then Cameron said…

  ‘You know my mum passed away?’

  I was shocked, and hit by a wave of sadness. When you leave people for so many years – when there’s no contact, no updates – you somehow assume that everything is okay. That no tragedy can possibly happen because you’re not there to see it. That because your world revolves around you, surely nothing happens without you. But that’s not how life works.

  ‘God… Cameron, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But Dad’s doing good. He’s remarried now. Living in a small village in Yorkshire. There’s not really much of a Fijian community up there, so he’s a bit of a celebrity…’

  Which reminded me of something. Something incredible. Something about Cameron.

  Because when we were growing up, Cameron Dewa was hiding a secret…

  I hadn’t known about Cameron Dewa’s secret until a month or two after our final, tearful goodbye. It had been a horrible goodbye. In our minds we were going to be friends forever, and probably live side by side in a caravan park until we were 80. It was a goodbye so traumatic that in the end the only way I could find to cope with it was through the medium of poetry. I had written a poem entitled ‘Cameron Is My Best Friend’, through which I was able to exorcise the pain and trauma.

  But now that I think about it, all the clues to the secret were there. Clues pointing towards something I really should have known, given the hushed whispers and quiet mutters as we’d cycled around Loughborough, or kicked footballs, or swapped fascinating Michael Jackson trivia.

  There was the fact that I knew that his dad, Fred, was someone important back in Fiji. But then, everyone’s dad was someone important back then. Then there was the fact that it seemed like returning to Fiji was almost some kind of duty for the Dewas, rather than a choice. But ultimately, and most importantly, there was the Friday after school, just before Cameron left Loughborough for good.

  That Friday was the Friday of the school play. I wasn’t in this one – despite the fact that my accent now met with all accepted East Midlands guidelines. Cameron, however, was – playing a key, tree-based role in a forest scene. School was over and the sun was shining. Cameron and I cycled away on our BMXs, through the playground, past the magic tree and on, towards home. At the newsagent’s near Anil’s house, we stopped for some aniseed balls and a drink. We knew our time was running out, but neither wanted to say anything, in case somehow that made the end come faster. And so we rode wordlessly up the hill towards Spinney Hill Drive, turning the corner into the cul-de-sac until we saw something astonishing. Well – something that astonished me.

  A long, black limousine parked right outside my little house.

  With a smart, suited driver in it.

  A small Fijian flag above the grille.

  And a licence plate with FIJI 1 written on it.

  I skidded to a halt. Cameron stopped beside me.

  ‘I think that must be my dad’s friend,’ he said, as simply as that.

  We edged our way past the limo, pushing our bikes and keeping our heads low as a sign of deference to the man within. I couldn’t quite believe it. A limousine in Loughborough. You don’t get limousines in Loughborough. Even when Barbara Windsor, the most famous person Loughborough had ever seen, had arrived to open that Kwik Save on the market, it had been in a metallic green Austin Princess. That meant whoever was in my house was even more important than that woman who’d been in Carry On Camping.

  We opened the front door, took our shoes off and walked into the front room. And there they were… Cameron’s dad. My dad. The Fijian Minister of Defence. The Ambassador to Fiji. And my mum serving finger sandwiches.

  What were these people doing in my living room? Who was Cameron’s dad? What was that man doing in the limo outside?

  ‘Yes,’ said my mum. ‘The driver. Apparently he has to stay outside and keep a lookout.’

  A lookout? For what? What was going on?

  ‘I tried to offer him a cheese sandwich,’ she said. ‘But he said he couldn
’t take one on the grounds that I might be trying to assassinate him.’

  She said this as if people were constantly turning her sandwiches down for fear of political assassination.

  It turned out that the Minister of Defence and the Ambassador had come all the way to Loughborough to congratulate Cameron’s dad on finishing his doctorate at the university. The completed doctorate which meant he would now return to Fiji as soon as possible. Cameron’s dad had wound up stuck for things to show them in Loughborough – I believe they’d already had a Wimpy and seen the Woolworths pick ’n’ mix – and so decided to bring them round to our house for a cup of tea.

  Cameron and I had a sandwich and discussed it.

  ‘How come these guys are in Loughborough?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh… you know,’ he said. ‘They’re friends of the family. Hey – did you say you got a new He-Man?’

  And we went and played with Ram-Man.

  Later that evening, the limousine gave me and Cameron a lift down to the school play – where Cameron was preparing for his role as a magical tree in an enchanted forest (a role that consisted mainly of him standing very still and every now and then squeezing a small bottle of talcum powder which represented fairy dust) and we got out, like Hollywood stars.

  As it would turn out, all this had been a small moment in world history.

  ‘I remember that!’ said Cameron, putting his pint down. ‘The guy with the main guy was supposed to make sure that he didn’t give away any secrets about Fiji. But your mum got it all out of him within ten minutes. She got Fijian military secrets from him. And while he was away, Rambuka held a coup in Fiji. He made himself President. All while your mum was making them little sandwiches.’

  ‘My mum got secret information out of the Minister of Defence?’ I said, shocked, as Cameron nodded. ‘Using little sandwiches?’

  I bet Mata Hari would be pissed off she didn’t think of that one. Which reminded me of something… something to do with Berlin…

  ‘It was quite a coup!’ said Cameron, and we both fell about laughing. Cameron looked delighted with his pun. This was brilliant.