Free Namedropper by Emma Forrest

Miller.
    As he tidied, sweeping up the ash from the case of an Iggy Pop CD, Drew suddenly started burbling again, as if he had been briefly under water, talking away, and, afloat again, was ready to resume his babble.
    â€œNow, everyone knows about Marx and Freud and Einstein, but it’s amazing to think you also invented jeans. LeviStrauss. And boxing, as we know it, was pioneered by Daniel Mendoza. Chocolate, even—the Hershey family.”
    â€œThey’re not Jewish. They should be, but they weren’t.”
    â€œNot even Barbara?”
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    â€œOh.” He sat down on the bed, as if faint from shock. I tried to think of something nice to say.
    â€œWell, you know Liz Taylor converted when she married Mike Todd, and had a proper Jewish wedding with Eddie Fisher.”
    He smiled, wanly. This was a dumb conversation to be having. If Manny’d been there, he’d have been rolling his eyes.
    As soon as I thought it, Drew got up and announced, like a ventriloquist’s puppet, “You call your uncle whilst I’m in the shower.” His timing didn’t surprise me because Manny has taught me to believe in telepathy and the power of the mind. ESP is perfectly believable because it is conducted human to human, like a cheaper and more immediate e-mail system.
    Manny says everything else is bullshit, especially tarot, because the future isn’t fixed. Ghosts come to us at our beds at night, rouse us from our sleep, because all they are is a dream. I sometimes feel someone sitting on my chest and clasping my throat in the middle of the night, but Manny explained that it’s just me, holding my breath. Ghosts are a get-out to cover up how powerful our minds and bodies really are. It’s less frightening to think that there is a great big bloody phantom trying to choke us than that the stress of everyday living has got to us so much that we choose to hold our breath in the night. That’s what he says, anyway.
    I believe it. The people I know who enjoy life the most arethe ones who control their own sleep, who decide not to wake up at night, terrified of ghosts, and therefore never do. Treena can be up all night, doing speed, and then decide to sleep, and there she goes. And, no matter how much she’s drunk, she can wake up when she wants to. Rather than use an alarm clock, she bangs on her head the time she needs to get up the next day. So if she needs to be awake by eight, she taps her head eight times as it hits the pillow. It never fails.
    It struck me that Drew might be a figment of my imagination, an excess of energy generated by my hatred for Tommy Belucci and my fury at the bouncer and Ray, but something about his voice was so unfamiliar, so beyond my realm of celluloid experience, I could never have made it up.
    â€œDrew, if I may ask, where did you get your accent?”
    He turned up the volume on the TV and answered, fast and quiet, “It’s Middle European.”
    â€œIt’s what?”
    â€œYou know, Middle European. Hungarian. Or something.”
    â€œOh my God.” I dropped my glass. “Are you trying to do a Jewish accent?”
    He ran into the bathroom and closed the door. Oh my God.
    Maybe he was like one of those serial killers who are so good at deluding themselves that they become an innocent character who genuinely didn’t do it. Four in the morning in solitary confinement they might have doubts. Maybe once at four in the morning Andrew called down to reception for a Coke and accidentally reverted to his real accent, Watford perhaps, until he caught himself. God forbid the part-time bellboy flicking through the
Sun
, returning to page 3 to keephimself awake, God forbid he should hear Drew’s real accent.
    With some trepidation, I called Manny. The answerphone was on. “Hi, you’ve reached Manny and Viva. Viva is off gallivanting across the country with degenerates when she should be