The Genius in my Basement

Look up: supermarket bags, bags, bags sloshing off to the horizon. And what’s inside them? Sour-milk-coloured objects.

Rammed inside every one of these plastic carriers, stretching the entire length of the Excavation, rising here and there into surges, filling tea-chest-sized cardboard boxes, leaping up and taking over tables, seeping under doors, splattering the insides of forlorn wardrobes and cooking cupboards, submerging chairs, sloshing against the bed legs:

Bus timetables. Tens of thousands of them.

All of them out of date.

Time is very quiet in this house.

Nothing shifts in the potato light.

Not everything is disordered. Maps, filed edgeways on the mantelpiece, collapse from upright in order of grubbiness.

Several times a day, a car races up the road outside – an IT exec on his way to the business park imagining he’s found a shortcut past the traffic at the bottom of the hill. The noise simmers, boils, trumpets … crumbles back to silence. Minutes later, another heated noise – fuel injection, optical steering, scented airbag, blur of walnut dash – a different IT exec escaping the traffic at the top of the hill.

On stormy days, Simon’s front patio kidnaps the wind. Billows of air kick up a panic, bang the window pane, rattle yellowfly off the buddleia branches, and are beaten senseless against the coalshed lock. The next day, resting under the ivy, are jelly-baby packets, a shoelace, half a pair of spectacles, a bottle of Lucozade, half drunk, containing two cigarette butts.

FRONT CAVE of Dr Simon MINUS Norton’s Excavation: THE FICTION.

The only regular noise inside the Excavation is from the boiler in the corridor across the room from where we’re standing. Every now and then this ancient box of tubes gives a wearied huff of gas. In winter, the low whisper during the hours of 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. is like the hum of a mortuary fridge. Although we don’t know it now, a bubble of carbon monoxide is building up in this corridor. A builder, who will appear in a few chapters’ time, will discover this bubble with his electronic instruments. It is trembling disgustingly behind the door. If it weren’t for the relieving swirls of fresh air from the top-floor tenants getting their bikes out of the corridor, it would long ago have oozed into Simon’s front room and murdered the entire house. In a few months, gleaming new copper pipes will stream up and down the wall, spreading warmth, hot water and legal compliance.

Apart from Death and three bicycles, this corridor contains only one thing, tidily lined up along the shelves: gingham bags – the sort Chinese peasants carry when running away from floods.

Simon’s basement feels like a resting place at the end of a long plunge.

I would have liked now to spend some time with you looking at the back room of the Excavation. It’s tidier than the front. There’s a large writing desk with three broken manual typewriters, and a mahogany occasional table – clean, free of dust – supporting a potplant, now dead, its leaves the colour of pie crust, and a snapshot of two children carrying a warthog. On one side of this room is a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on which everything is stored in marvellous order. To repeat: I would have liked to have investigated this, but – I don’t know if you’ve sensed it too – for the last few minutes I’ve been aware of a gentle extra odour of sardines coming over my right shoulder.

Someone is standing behind me.

5

You know, people think that mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit. It’s the stuff we can understand. It’s … cats that are complicated. I mean, what is it in those little molecules and stuff that make one cat behave differently to another, or that make a cat? I mean, how do you define a cat? I’ve no idea.

Professor John Horton Conway, Simon’s former colleague

I don’t mind cats, as long as they don’t sit on my genitals.

Simon

‘As I say …’

Simon’s voice is monotonic. The equivalent of a glassy stare, for mouths.

‘As I say …’

Simon often begins his sentences like this, ‘As I say,’ when he has never said anything of the sort before.

‘As I say …’

If he’s truly enraged at finding us down here, it will burst through eventually: a bubble in the mire.

‘As I say, I am prepared to reconsider the matter of this book on the condition that my mother is the litmus paper.’

Pushing the fish tin into his pocket, he yanks up his holdall, breaks away from two Marks and Spencer’s bags oozing over his feet and barges towards the bed, shoelaces flapping. ‘My mother must be the test. You must write for her. If she approves the pages then they can go in the text.’ He extracts a book he’s been carrying under his arm. ‘I have brought a thesaurus. Now, let’s see: there are certain words I know she would prefer you not to use …’

The Dutch mahogany bed is rather high. He has to swing his holdall on first, reverse his bottom into position, take a breath and make a leap backwards to get himself up onto the top surface.

Pressing the thesaurus onto the pillow with his fist, Simon peels it open in a way that makes me think of pastry dough and feel hungry.

‘Would your mother like to hear you called “unemployed”?’ he says. ‘Unemployed, unemployed, unemployed …’ dabbing his finger down the page. ‘Hnnnh, here it is: entry 266.’

‘But I’m not unemployed,’ I point out. ‘I have a job: I’m under contract to write about you. Do you have a job?’

‘No.’

‘Then you are unemployed.’

At mathematics conferences Simon is euphemistically listed as an ‘independent’ researcher.

For the tax man, he turns the ‘un-’ into a ‘self-’.

When filling in survey forms, he puffs up his chest, rattles memories of past glory, and describes himself as ahem! ‘In part-time work.’

‘The fact,’ he observes, ‘that the mathematics department here at Cambridge is not paying me doesn’t mean I’m not working in the building any more. I still have an office and “independent researcher” is not a euphemism. It is a respectable designation, and does not mean “unemployed”. Put yourself in your mother’s shoes, then you’ll understand. Would you want your children to think their father was a euphemism …?’

My eyes return to his bag. It appears to be new. Every five or ten years Simon gets a fresh holdall and, for a few months, looks suspicious. The new fabric sparkles against his saggy trousers. It’s as if he’s just passed a luggage shop and knocked off the first item he could reach in the window display, together with all its stuffing.

‘Here we go: “Unemployed, adjective: at rest, quiescent … motionless, stagnant … subsidence …” I certainly wouldn’t like it if any of my children were written about like that. Hnnnh, let’s see,’ he continues. ‘“… becalmed, at anchor, vegetating, deadness …”.’ There’s no stopping him.

He also disputes my use of ‘sacked’.

‘“Sacked” … let’s see,’ he turns to another page: ‘“let go”? “let fall”? “relinquish”? Aaah, “liberate”!’

‘But you were sacked. You had a job, and you lost it because your students refused to come to your lectures and you were always sitting on a …’

‘I was not sacked,’ he interrupts.

‘According to my source, your students left in geometrical progression. First you had sixteen, then the next week, eight, then four, and when you got down to the last one, he died.’

‘I was not sacked,’ repeats Simon firmly. ‘I did not have my contract renewed. Everyone would agree there is a significant difference. And please do not say I was always sitting on a bus.’

The most astounding mathematical prodigy of his generation did not get his contract renewed? A man who has the answer to the symmetries of the universe in his sights, dismissed like a Brighton coffee-shop waitress? ‘Sacked’, I call it. ‘Sacked’ in all but technical fuss.

But Mummy must not be told.

‘I am not prepared to sacrifice her feelings to satisfy your artistic sensibilities,’ Simon sniffs. ‘The situation you are trying to manufacture reminds me of something I read in one of Hans Eysenck’s popular psychology books. He describes a Victorian with the pseudonym Walter, the ambition of whose life seems to have been to have sex with as many females as he could.’

‘I hardly think …’

‘Eysenck then expresses this point of view to put it up to ridicule: “What do the feelings of all these females matter in comparison with the satisfaction of Walter’s artistic needs?” As I say, my mother and children must be the test.’

It is only now, recovered from the shock of Simon discovering me trespassing down here – a fact that he still appears not to have noticed – that I finally detect the flaw in his argument.

‘But Simon, your mother died nine years ago.’

‘The principle is the same.’

‘And you don’t have any children.’

This is not the first time Simon’s had cause to complain about my intrusions. When I was researching my first book (‘which I think will also be your last’) he made the mistake of popping his head round the door of my study while I was interviewing my then subject, and before Simon had a chance to scramble out of the room again, I’d snatched him into print.

‘Twice winner of a Mathematics Olympiad Gold Medal …’ I’d written as his footsteps fled, ‘my landlord is a generous, mild man, as brilliant as the sun, but a fraction odd.’

‘One fact to get right, and you got it wrong in four different ways,’ protests Simon now.

One: the International Mathematics Olympiad does not award medals or (mistake two) golds, it hands out numbers: 1, 2 and 3. Three: there is no such thing as a ‘winner’ in these competitions: it is mathematics, not sprinting. You get a 1 for achieving a certain score or above. It is perfectly possible for all contenders to get a 1. Mistake four: three times – not twice – Simon scored this top grade, aged fifteen, sixteen and seventeen, and (although Simon insists he has forgotten this) one of those wins was with a triumphant 100 per cent, a perfect flush, and another with 99 per cent, one of the first boys in the world ever to achieve this mind-frazzling triumph. Others have managed it since, but unlike Simon they have had years of dedicated training, entirely skipped their adolescence, and looked like beaten-up tapeworms.

In just half a page of a biography about someone else I managed to misrepresent Simon in four ways, when all he’d done was have the bad luck to stray into my sight for five minutes.

‘Four errors in half a page is, hnn, eight errors in a full page, which in a full-length publication such as you are threatening to make this one, comes to, aaah, 2,000 or 3,000 instances of disregard for fact. Oh dear!’ he sighs. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’

True to expectation, the howlers in this manuscript have already arrived. ‘What do you mean,’ he says, submerging his arms into his holdall, for a moment looking puzzled, then following after with his head, as if his bag is eating him. ‘What do you mean,’ he reappears with a clutch of papers – the first chapters, which I emailed him this morning – ‘that women have a habit of shrieking when they come across me?’

‘Unexpectedly, when you’re hovering next to my bathroom door. They do.’

‘It may have happened once,’ he permits. ‘I do not think that makes a habit. I do not think my mother …’

‘Your dead mother, Simon. It’s happened three times.’

It’s not his looks. It’s the way he hovers outside the door, waxen and quiet. He’s not there with any wicked purpose. He’s been pacing up and down the front hall, tearing at his post or contemplating points of infinity in hyperbolic space, and just happens to have reached that end of the corridor when the bathroom door opens. His fixed stare gives him the impression of having enormous eyes. Muttonchop whiskers billow up the side of his face, as though his blank smile contained a fire.

Clipping from the Daily Mail, found in a sorry state by the clothes closet, front room of the Excavation. Reconstructed by the biographer.

Sprouting under his nostrils is half an inch of bristle where his electric shaving machine – based on circular movement – doesn’t reach into the corners of his nose. His stillness suggests someone plotting ambushes on a safari, or one of those people who squat in ponds with weeds on their heads, shooting ducks.

The woman shrieks. Mid-shriek, Simon does nothing, as though he’s thumbtacked between two seconds. Only once the screams have died down into gurgles of relief and apologies does he shake himself free with a heave of breath.

‘Hnnn!’ he says.

‘Hnnnn,’ he repeats.

Relieved to have resolved the situation so deftly, he thumps downstairs to the Excavation.

Another error he has noticed in these sample pages: why do I say he smells of sardines in tomato sauce? They’re not sardines, they’re kippers. They may, on occasion, be mackerel. And in all cases he buys them in oil. He dislikes tomato sauce.

‘If I can’t say you smell of sardines in tomatoes,’ I retort, ‘can I say you smell of fatty headless fish?’

It’s essential to emphasise that in no sense of the term is Simon mad. He’s covered in facial hair and wears rotten shoes and trousers for the opposite reason: too much mental order. He burps; he makes elephant yawns without putting his hand over his mouth; he thinks you won’t mind knowing about the progress of his digestion; and he goes on long, sweaty walks then doesn’t change his clothes for a week. But what else can he do? Everybody is messy somehow, and there’s no other place for Simon to store his quota. Inside his head there’s no room: all the mess has been swept out. It’s as pristine in there as a surgeon’s operating theatre.

Another word he doesn’t like in my manuscript is ‘stomps’.

‘What do you mean, I “stomp”? How do you know I “stomp”? I don’t believe you can hear me from upstairs. You’re not suggesting I “stomp” on the ceiling, are you?’

As for my description of his floor … ‘Oh dear,’ he groans, conclusively.

Suddenly, Simon loses interest. Although his face has no time for expressions, his legs and arms want to get on with it. He starts to wiggle his hands; his head begins to rotate; then, without explanation, he drops the thesaurus on his bedcover, bolts from the bed, dodging a wave of Asda bags (‘Sainsbury’s, Alex. I find it enhances one’s appreciation of a book if the facts are correct’) and hurries to the kitchen, gripping his peck of peppered kippers. Through the connecting door, I watch his hair weave around the lightbulb like a grey feather-duster. A large, disjointed man, he can move with surprising litheness.

People such as Simon – unknown, living people – don’t trust words. Words may be a familiar method of communication (although Simon generally prefers grunts or showing off bus tickets), but that doesn’t mean it’s respectable to make a living out of them, especially if you’re a sloppy scribbler with a lighthearted attitude to truth like me. Words are too nuanced and potentially destructive to be left in the hands of someone so unrigorous. A straightforward four-letter noun beginning with f—

‘No!’

– defining your style of accommodation, and bang! The entire disciplinary force of Cambridge City Council rushes up the hill with clipboards to snap, tick and bylaw you into a magistrate’s court.

For Simon, the world is a leaky place. You have constantly to be on your guard against the seeping away or sudden disappearance of comfort. He imagines that this book (‘if it ever comes out’) will be ‘bedside reading’ for housing inspectors. He thinks they might run him out of the city.

If that’s what words can do when wrongly applied to a few cubic feet of basement air enclosed by bricks and bramble-bush-covered windows, what massacre will they perform on the central object of a full-length biography – which is a trillion misunderstandings-in-waiting – i.e. a living human being?

Simon says he doesn’t stomp. I say he does. Simon says he should know, since a) he does the non-stomping and b) he’s closer to his feet than I am.

‘But if you are stomping on the ceiling, then my ears are closer,’ I observe. ‘Biography – especially biography of an unknown person – is not and cannot be about reality.’ I follow after him to the kitchen. ‘It’s no more about reality than, say, say … minus numbers. And just as the solution to the problem of the impossible existence of minus numbers is to realise that they are not real things at all, but something you’ve done to positive numbers, i.e. you’ve “minus-ed” them – in short, minus numbers are verbs, not nouns – so in biography, it’s not the real subject, but the active, i.e. verbal, relationship between the biographer and subject that …’

‘Mathematicians do not think of negative numbers like that,’ interrupts Simon, tugging at the mackerel tin, which has somehow got wedged in his pocket. ‘We think of them as real objects. Exactly as real as positive numbers.’

‘The reason that a biography of an unknown person cannot be about reality,’ I continue regardless, ‘is because the reader will fall asleep. Reality is too bland. An ordinary person doesn’t have the dramatic and universally appreciated facts of the famous to rely on. They’ve only got the oddness and power of their character. So,’ I say, expanding my chest with the sudden conviction that I am going to be able to complete these sentences neatly, ‘a biography of the unknown has to be a biographer’s effort to interpret facts, his impression of the facts – what has been done to the facts by his brain. It’s about one person’s mumbled attempts vaguely to interpret what they dimly think they might have seen on a misty day in another person’s possible behaviour, but which they quite possibly haven’t; and any biographer who puts pen to paper claiming his motives are objectivity and truth is a fraud. Biography is not mathematics. It is not bus timetables. What matters is not whether or not you “stomp”, in fact, since who can know that as a fact, but that I think you stomp, and by the way, aren’t you supposed to take the sweetcorn out of the supermarket bag before you put the tin in boiling water?’

Squeak of a tap; the cymbal clatter of high-pressure liquid on thin cooking steel; the castanets and maracas of bubbles; muffled turbulence as the pot fills.

Simon’s wolfish. While we were trespassing through the rubbish in this basement, he’d been on a moonlit hike around the city distributing anti-car newsletters for an environmental campaign group called Transport 2000, and it’s emptied his belly. After buses and trains, the thing that matters most to him is his digestive tract.

Small headless fish are his favourite food. Except when in Montreal, Simon boils his kippers in the tin, ‘to save on washing up’. Kippers come in a different-sized tin in Canada, and ‘I don’t want to take the chance of doing something wrong.’ In Montreal he eats frozen fish in supermarket display packs – not because he prefers it, but because the label tells him what to do, which is comforting, although he never grills, ‘because you can’t see what’s going on’.

Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simon does not enjoy variety in food.

‘I like to find a formula that works and stick to it,’ he insists, stepping out of the kitchen to make sure I understand. ‘I once found myself in possession of mackerel in curry sauce because I’d failed to look carefully enough when in the supermarket. I couldn’t finish it.

‘Yes, I am a worrier. My mother was a worrier.’

Simon is incapable of frowning; his expressions are limited to petulance, grinning and vacuity. He adopts the last, and returns to the stove.

Mackerel Norton, the dish he is preparing this evening, is his Number One meal. It comes in two forms: finger-scalding hot; and body temperature. Tonight, he’s having it hot.

Mackerel Norton for one

1 x tin of mackerel fillets, any sort, as long as not in tomato sauce.

1 x flavoured Batchelor’s Chinese packet rice. (‘I sometimes use “Golden Vegetable”.’)

2 x pans of boiling water.

Put first two in the third. Bubble rice frothily for correct time. Release rice, spurt open mackerel, eat on bed with much handwaving and gulps of cool air.

He would, if he could, eat Mackerel Norton seven days a week; but world events and the pressures of anti-car campaigning are such that he can barely manage to get it three days in a row. The rest of the time he gobbles two forms of takeaway (chicken biriyani and chicken in black bean sauce), chilli-flavour crisps from Morrisons and Bombay mix.

This evening Simon has accidentally picked up a different-flavour packet rice, and is alarmed. Cooking instructions are suspect to Simon. They are the route errors use when they want to sneak into your stomach. Why should one flavour respond to hot water in the same way as another? How can you be sure that one rice packet, representing the products of a country containing yellow people in blue boilersuits, should be treated the same as another packet, from a country 16,000 miles distant from the first, with brown people and cactuses? Cooking instructions have no appreciation of the slyness of variables.

‘Uugggh, do Mexican vegetables boil in the same way as Chinese?’ Simon asks, waving the packet at me through the kitchen door.

In Simon’s kitchen there are no cobwebs. An aerosol of grease has killed them off. If you stand on a footstool, it is possible to find – original inhabitants, from before the Extinction Event (Simon’s purchase of the house in 1981) – dead spiders inhumed above the wall cupboards, in the Cretaceous layers of fat.

There is evidence of urgent eating everywhere. The oil slicks on the melamine surfaces; eyebrow hairs embedded around the sink; foot and shoe grime that has gathered on the plastic embossed-tile flooring, making it look almost as though there is a rug on top; the curtains of grease moving down the sides of the sink like textured glass.

Simon is not unhealthy. The principal source of serious infection in any house – the water supply – is cleaner here than in most places, because the attic in which the water head is stored is used as a room for tenants, and is therefore easily accessible and frequently checked. I can vouch for the fact that there are no mice floating in it, or spiders, woodlice, bloated and putrefying snails, or dead rats, as there certainly will be in the water tanks belonging to some of the people reading this sentence.

He is not unhygienic, except in the eyes of today’s dainty obsessives and kitchen-product advertisers. He has a bath once a week and cleans his teeth daily. But he is not frightened of his digestion. Simon’s connection with decomposing food begins and ends, openly and honestly, as it does with all animals at ease: with a squelchy chew at one end and a sigh of release at the other.

In a tidy kitchen, every knife, plate, whisk, frying pan, coffee mug, ladle, tea strainer, chopping board and all machines are stagnant with cleanliness, with the exception of the dishwasher murmuring disinfectant-speak under the sink. The object of the tidy and twee housekeeper is to remove all proof that he is a functioning organism.

In Simon’s kitchen, Hunger has slobbered everywhere.

Yellow smears splashed along the left-hand worktop are from cartons of chicken biriyani, the lid ripped off; the drips of purple, slightly granulated, are Fern’s® brinjal pickle; the intermingled slops of ochre green, Mr Patak’s® mixed pickle.