Alexander Masters - The Genius in my Basement

The woman in front’s face was soured by watchfulness. Simon, though sexless as a nematode, is the fantasy image of a kiddy-fiddler, and this Bruiser Mum had spent her morning proudly dressing up her six-year-old daughter in lash-thickening mascara, gloss lipstick, Primark miniskirt and pink heels.

Simon, blank-eyed, belly exposed, his ski jacket rucked halfway up to his chest, threw himself at the seat with a self-congratulatory sigh and let his face settle around his grin.

I stood beside him, took out a notebook, and consulted a list of urgent biographical questions. It is important, with Simon, to select not just the correct wording for a query – one that doesn’t contain any banned nouns or adjectives, or lead to outbursts of correction because of a tiny factual error – but also the right context. PHILOSOPHICAL questions are best on a Tuesday night. This is because he has returned from his weekend jaunt to Scarborough, via Glasgow, the Isle of Man and Pratt’s Bottom, finished his week’s backlog of 347 emails: he is feeling expansive and post-prandial. Questions requiring REMINISCENCE can be extended as far as Thursday, or broached on country walks through Iron Age hill forts – there is nothing quite like 2000-year-old battlements, where the clash of Roman legion against shrieking Celt still trembles in the air, to get Simon going on the subject of Ashdown, his junior school.

Bus trips to the train station are strictly for the exchange of FACTS .

The scholar of Simon Norton Studies must proceed with delicacy.

‘I wanted to ask about your grandfather, Aslan,’ I began. ‘He was a businessman, wasn’t he?’

‘If you say so.’

‘What did he sell?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘According to your brothers it was textiles, but what …’

‘Yesterday I was in Blickling.’ Simon pinched his fingers into his wallet and extracted a worm of paper. ‘Here’s the ticket.’

‘Simon, your grandfather . Was it jute?’

He waggled the ticket higher in the air, closer to my face. Four inches long, it had arrowhead shapes cut out at either end, and purple 1970s techno-writing along the length repeating with great mechanical urgency, top and bottom, that it was 1.23 p.m. in King’s Lynn, and that Sheldrake Travel was ‘very happy to have you aboard’.

(‘I do not think that could have been the ticket I showed you. There is no direct bus from King’s Lynn to Blickling. But if you prefer to get things wrong deliberately, you belong on the team of a trash publication like the National Enquirer .’)

‘Is there anything special about it?’ I asked, too self-conscious to hold the snippet of paper up to the light and try out his squinting trick, without at least some guarantee of reward.

Simon considered for a moment, then shook his head contentedly. ‘No.’

‘I was in Blickling last week, too,’ said a fellow sitting beside Simon. The man was resting his chin on his hands, which were in turn piled on the handle of his walking cane; he bounced his head gently. ‘Lovely hall, and, aaah, the lake. I got there very early and the mist, it was …’

‘Did you go on any buses?’ Simon blurted.

‘To the hall,’ agreed the man, nodding some more, rather slowly, as if tapping the sharpness out of the interruption.

‘From?’ shot Simon.

‘Norwich, I believe it …’

‘The number X5,’ Simon declared, and directed a smile of triumph around the bus.

The elderly man was not to be put off: he was a trouper for the cause of discursive memoir. ‘I think my favourite – I mean, lakes are always lovely, but lakes are lakes, I always say – my favourite was the Chinese Room. Did you see that? That flock wallpaper, it was flock, wasn’t it, and that pagoda in the glass cage …?’

‘Any other buses?’ interjected Simon bluntly.

‘Well, after lunch, we went to Cromer, and had the most delicious brown crab …’

‘The X5 again. Unless you went on a Sunday?’

‘No, let’s see, Tuesday, that’s it, because then at Wells-Next-the-Sea, the sunlight on the water was sparkling in just …’

‘Uggh, ah …’ Simon pulled out a dog-eared timetable from his bag and searched the pages. ‘Let’s see, aah … the 73.’ Spotting that Nodding Man still had a bit of life in him, Simon brought in the heavy artillery, lifted out a second book, which seemed to be compressed from the scrag ends of newspaper, ran his fingers down the index and began darting back and forth between two sections at once. ‘But you could have taken the 645 and changed at … let’s see, aaah … or, uuugh, aaaghhh, if you’d wanted to go on the steam railway …

(‘Alex! What are you saying? Number 73? Number 645? A steam train? I am sure you have invented these references also. I could not have said them. Do you want me to be seen as an ignoramus on public transport?’)

‘… which calls at hnnnn … King’s Lynn, and …’

It began to rain. First, a barely visible drizzle, picked out only against certain backgrounds – the black reflections in the windows of the Cambridge Hotel; a middle-distance blurriness when the bus stopped at the crossroads by the Catholic church, and we had a view up to the park. But it might have been nothing more than stripes of movement left in my eyes by the Clint Eastwood action smack-’em-blast-’em-ride-off-into-them-thar-cactus-lands flick I’d watched last night. Next, streaks of water on the window. Finally, drops pounding the metal sill by Simon’s elbow in buttercup explosions.

‘Getting back to your grandfather, Aslan …’

The driver slammed the brakes and swerved to avoid a line of Japanese girls who’d abruptly pedalled across the road in front. The bus was filled with sudden pushes and violent attempts to avoid falling over. I crashed forward down the aisle and fell sideways onto the six-year-old nympho.

‘Oi, watch where you’re fucking going,’ growled Bruiser Mum.

Simon, who spends much of his time smiling, smiled wider. He burrowed into his bag and, after much rustling and what looked like punches delivered at the fabric from the inside, re-emerged holding a carton of passionfruit juice, which he upended over his mouth.

At the end of the nineteenth century there were 50,000 Jews – a quarter of the city’s population – living peaceably alongside Arabs in Baghdad. Today, according to the latest web report, there are four – four in the entire city. The pro-Hitler Iraqi government expelled and murdered them in pogroms before and during the Second World War. In the late 1940s underground movements smuggled them to safety at the rate of 1,000 a month. In 1951, Israel airlifted 60,000 more from the whole of Iraq and, with the perversity of the self-justified, bombed the rest to try to persuade them to follow. There are today more ostriches in Baghdad than there are Jews.

On one edge of the genealogical poster I’d excavated in the basement is a dedicatory note about Simon’s family:

All probabilities and evidence go to suggest that this community is descended from the ancient Jewish communities settled in Mesopotamia since the days of the Babylonian Captivity, 2,600 years ago … The purpose, in compiling the genealogical table, is to preserve, in some way, a record of a section of this community

The very same day that Israel finally declared independence as a refuge for the most persecuted race on earth, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq launched a combined attack, which the Secretary of the Arab League declared on Cairo radio was ‘a war of extermination, and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades’.

‘Murder the Jews! Murder them all!’ shrieked the leading Islamic scholar of Jerusalem.