I go to the bottom of the list of Dom’s search results and click on the one he went to first. Might as well follow the same chronological order. I feel more alert than I have for a long time.
It’s time to find the Braids.
Lewis is on LinkedIn, though there’s no photograph of him, only a grey-man silhouette. So he couldn’t be bothered to upload a picture. I skim over the list of his former jobs, several of which he had while I knew him. His current position, ‘2015 to present’, is ‘CEO of VersaNova Technologies, an application software company based in Delray Beach, Florida.
Dominic was right. How absurd that I needed to see it with my own eyes to believe it, given that my eyes have been seeing the impossible lately, in broad daylight.
Still. Lewis working for a company in America doesn’t mean Flora couldn’t have been in Hemingford Abbots this morning. Yesterday morning, I correct myself. It’s after midnight; tomorrow is now technically today.
In Lewis’s ‘Contact Information’ there’s a VersaNova email address for him, and a link to a Twitter account. Clicking on the link, I find myself staring at his smiling face. The photo that he’s chosen to represent him on his Twitter page, the one that appears in a little circle next to each of the short messages he’s posted, is of him suntanned and grinning, wearing a black and grey baseball cap.
Like most people, after a gap of more than a decade, he looks older than when I last saw him.
Like everyone except his children, Thomas and Emily, who look exactly the same as they did twelve years ago.
His official name on Twitter is @VersaNovaLewB. I remember Ben joining Twitter and having to choose a name like that. He called himself @boycalledBen, which prompted Zannah to say that she was embarrassed to be related to him.
Lewis’s smile is exactly the same: wide and full enough to dimple his cheeks and narrow his eyes, and alarming in its intensity, as if he might be about to start teasing you in a way you’re not going to like very much. He used to do that a lot. There was no point asking him to stop – he’d only do it more. For nearly a year he called Dominic ‘Rom-com Dom’ after we all went to see a movie, About a Boy, that Dom liked as much as Flora and I did, despite being a man. Eventually Lewis professed to find this hilarious, though at first he found it implausible. On the way home from the cinema, he hounded Dom relentlessly: ‘Really? You liked it? I mean, liked liked? You actually thought it was good?’
There’s a larger photograph, a kind of personalised banner at the top of his page. This one’s a picture of Lewis and two other men in suits and ties, all grinning as if in competition to look the most triumphant. Lewis is in the middle and holding a knife, about to cut into a large, square cake covered in white icing and decorated with blue piped writing. The cake has four candles. Further down Lewis’s Twitter page, I find this same picture again, underneath the words ‘Happy 4th Birthday, VersaNova Technologies!’
That was posted on 28 January this year. So Lewis’s company is four years old.
‘If it looks like it’s four, it’s probably sixteen,’ I mutter, then laugh. ‘Like Thomas and Emily.’ Sorry, Lewis. You always hated my sense of humour.
I’m exaggerating. He didn’t hate it, but he didn’t understand it either. Any joke that was eccentric or surreal, he used to object to. ‘But why’s that funny?’ he would demand. ‘Tell me. I don’t get it.’ His idea of funny was saying something and then contradicting it a few seconds later, especially if he knew it would disappoint you. The more crushed you looked, the funnier he found it. Like the time the four of us went on holiday together to Mexico. At Heathrow Airport, Lewis grabbed me by the arm and whispered in my ear, ‘Hey, see that lady over there? She said they were going to upgrade us to first class. Not just business class. First.’
‘That’s amazing,’ I said. ‘Do Dom and Flora know?’ I couldn’t understand why he was telling me alone, when the other two were standing only a short distance away.
‘Actually, she didn’t say that at all,’ said Lewis casually. ‘I made it up.’ Then he spent the next hour laughing at my gullibility.
Imagine if he knew that you’re gullible enough to believe Thomas and Emily haven’t aged in the last twelve years …
Dom’s words from earlier replay in my mind: ‘Lewis Braid’s a weirdo. Always was.’
We liked him, though. Didn’t we? We must have done. We went on holiday with him more than once. He was one of our best friends.
All the same … Now that I come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever whole-heartedly liked him. I was always wary of what he might do or say. I found his confidence impressive, and he had a great line in entertaining rants, but I also felt unsettled by him. He suggested more activities that I felt a strong and defensive need to resist than most people I knew: marathon boozing sessions, terrifying-sounding hikes up the sides of remote mountains, unpleasant prank campaigns against anyone that any of us disliked.
He was interesting and unpredictable, and could liven up a room purely by walking into it.
He had a strange habit of bursting in, like a cowboy crashing into a bar-room, about to pull a gun. Instead of a gun, Lewis would typically produce an unexpected declaration of some kind, something that made everyone look up and take notice. It could be anything from ‘Your lord and king is here, motherfuckers!’ to ‘Hey, Dom, Beth – your next-door neighbour’s wanking over his computer. I’ve identified the optimal vantage point, if you want to catch some of the action.’
He was horrified when we all said we had no desire to watch. ‘What is wrong with you freaks?’ he yelled, actually upset that we were missing out. ‘It’s the most grotesque and embarrassing thing you’re likely to see all year! You’re a bunch of fucking philistines.’
Dom was right: Lewis Braid was weird, and he could be a giant pain in the arse, but we’d have had less fun without him around, no doubt about it. Life would have been much less colourful.
I read a few of the posts he’s put on his Twitter page. There’s no hint of his more outrageous side here. It’s all bland and professional: ‘Small can be beautiful at VersaNova – great team, fantastic colleagues and a mission worth working for!’ ‘It’s a beautiful day for the opening of the ATARM conference here in Tampa, Florida. Proud to be one of the sponsors of this fantastic event, 18–20 April!’ ‘VersaNova named in @technovators Top 10 Tech Companies to Watch in 2019’ ‘Great to see our technology director Sheryl Sotork featured in CapInvest Magazine’ ‘“Patient Capital Delivers Results” – thrilled to be one of the software companies featured in this article.’
I don’t know what I was hoping for. ‘Hey, guys, it’s a bit strange but my oldest two children seem to have stopped growing …’
I keep scrolling further down, reading tweets from last week, last month, the end of last year. Lewis doesn’t post on here very often – only once or twice a month. There’s nothing interesting in December last year, or November.
Wait. What’s this?
In October, he posted a link to what looks like an Instagram account in his name. I click to open it. I have no idea what a grown man’s account might look like. I’m more familiar with Instagram than with Twitter or LinkedIn. Zannah sometimes shows me selfies posted there by girls at her school and asks me if I think they’re flames, mingers or donkeys, which apparently, as everyone who is not ‘so lame’ knows, are the only three categories.