Alexander Masters - The Genius in my Basement

‘OK. How about this: why did your ancestors leave Iraq for Calcutta in the first place?’

‘Oh, dear, no. No, no,’ Simon replied. ‘I can’t possibly remember that. A . How can I be expected to remember what happened before my birth?’

Letter to grandparents, from Simon (signing himself by number 5) aged 5.

In all of Simon’s recollections Kitty hobbles. After emigrating in the year he-doesn’t-know-when, leaving behind he-doesn’t-know-why her husband Aslan, she bought a he-doesn’t-know-what-type-of-house in Woking with a bamboo plantation.

‘Bam boo ?’

Simon doesn’t-know-how – I mean, doesn’t know how – it got there. Every day, until her nineties, she dragged herself round, at first flicking gravel off the petunia bed with her walking stick; then, in her final stages of life, pruning the box-hedge parterre from her wheelchair, pushed by a daughter or a friendly guest.

‘One of her legs was broken,’ is Simon’s explanation for the hobble.

‘Permanently?’ I asked, and paused. ‘Which one?’

Simon thought carefully. ‘H (pained), the left.’ Then he considered the problem a moment longer: ‘A (aggravated), the right.’

Another bout of concentration.

‘They alternated. Would you like some Bombay mix?’

Letter to his mother, aged 5.

When she wasn’t in the garden, Kitty sat in the front room overlooking the croquet lawn and played bridge. Her entire last thirty years seem to have been wasted on hobbling and cards.

Grandfather Aslan was ‘fairy-like’. Once every few years he appeared in London for a week, then disappeared. ‘Feeew-ff, just like that.’ The rest of the time he remained in Calcutta, the very successful dealer in … Simon still-doesn’t-know-what.

That’s it. There’s no point in prolonging this ancestral agony.

*11

Introducing

Just as a square can be rotated through four turns to get it back to where it was to begin with, and the results laid out in a Group Table, the same approach can be applied to every regular shape. The size of the table you need to draw depends on how many operations have to be performed before you’ve exhausted all the possibilities and ended up back where you started. An equal-sided triangle can be manhandled three times before it’s back on its feet:

As before, these represent the act of turning Triangle. The trick of the game is to find all the ways you can fiddle with Triangle and yet leave it looking just the same afterwards as it did before you began:

And (again as before, with Square) these turns combine in the most obvious way …

In words, turn Triangle once, then turn it again, and the result is two turns: one plus one equals two. It is easy to spin Triangle head over high-heels, if that’s what you want:

2 + 1 = 0

(two turns, followed by one turn, returns Triangle to its original position)

Remember, in Group Theory, turning a regular shape right round is taken to be the same as doing nothing at all. Full, completed turns don’t get totted up. It’s only the overall adjustment that matters:

2 + 2 = 1

The corresponding table (which, as with Square, looks like a pint-sized sudoku table) is therefore:

Once again, we’ve got through a mathematical section with a suspicious lack of awfulness, like someone who’s committed a crime in the woods.

Is that all there is to it? Was that really mathematics?

The mist in these woods is hushed. A distant leaf clatters among the branches like a falling pin.

Let it be whispered: a saucy chapter is approaching.

12

I had a camera once. When I found it wasn’t working, I had a sigh of relief.

Simon

The name ‘Norton’ is a fake. Simon’s paternal grandparents, from Germany, died before he was born – ‘No Nazis involved.’ His paternal grandfather anglicised the name from Neuhofer – i.e. New Towner, usually turned into Newton – then fiddled the result to sound less desperate. The only thing we can say for certain about these people, Simon pronounces sententiously, ‘is that when the surname was being used in Germany, the one place the Neuhofers did not live was in any village called Neuhof’. Then he sits back and stares at me happily, waiting for understanding to dawn.

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