Alexander Masters - The Genius in my Basement

Then he barged out of the front door, and, the scuff of his sandals becoming rapidly soft and seaside-ish, disappeared towards the Mathematics Faculty.

A book about Simon that doesn’t have Simon in it?

I had thought a life of Simon would be tiptoeing on the edge of the shadow of God. Instead, he crashes about my study as though heel-joints had never been invented; makes women shriek when they turn on the light in the corridor and find him standing there like an Easter Island statue; his holdall twists him into animal shapes; he hides behind envelopes.

He shocks me awake with his snores.

Writing biographies of living people, the subject is an irritant. Why is he needed? All he does is insist that whatever you’ve written is wrong.

In fact, when Simon was part of the book, I had to run away from him.

Wouldn’t all biographies be better if they gave up trying to fix the person they’re writing about, and confined themselves to his glints and reflections – not a biography of Simon, but of the perception of Simon? What is a biography, anyway? A platter of gossip and titbits. It’s up to the readers to mix these components together in whatever way they find most entertaining and instructive. The subject’s out of it. Once word hits page, he’s irrelevant.

I’m glad Simon’s gone. Good riddance!

In mathematics, you jump onto the subject of numbers through your experience of reality – two flies multiplied by four sudden pulls gives eight wings; three toads, two frogs and one bathtub equals six screams of fury from your father; four bags of crisps and five of your mum’s fags make nine orders of stomach ache – that’s how the newcomer gets introduced to the subject, via the positive, whole numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 …

But mathematicians insist that negative numbers are equally real. It’s just a matter of which way you happen to look: going ahead is positive, and going behind is negative.

I’ll go behind Simon. Allow me to introduce Biographical Minus N:

Simon Phillips MINUS Norton.

Now, let’s break into his basement.

4

26th November 1922: Carter pierced a small hole in the wall through which he could look into the Pharaoh’s chamber with a sliver of torch light. Asked if he could see anything he replied, ‘yes, wonderful things!’

Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb

But I can’t find the light switch.

Which is important when you’re standing at the top of Simon’s stairs with nothing but sardine stench and book-writer’s bones to break your fall. Every other house in our terrace has a light switch by the stairwell door – why has Simon wrenched his out?

It makes me tense. My nerves clench into a knot. It feels planned.

There are holes in the stair carpet: lips of fabric at the edge of the treads, cut to flop forward, snatch … tap-tap … your toes …

… and plunge you onto the quarry tiles at the bottom.

These stairs are booby-trapped – against biographers.

Phhuuuuh! What was that? A moth? No. Just a grease dollop drifting by. Unidentified species often float up this stairwell.

It’s safest to take the rest of the steps spreadeagle fashion, one foot slithering against the wall while the other rat-a-tats along the bannister spindles. The palms of my hands catch and release on splodges of stickiness. As I slide down, I pass over two treads that have been blasted away. The wood has been broken in. It’s a sheer drop between the thigh-shredding splinters left behind to the floor below. Craftily, Simon has left the carpet in place over the chasm.

The only person who has been caught by this booby trap is the booby who manufactured it in the first place, Dr Simon MINUS Norton. The other week, I remember, I saw him leaping about the street on one leg, clutching his knee.

At last, here, at the bottom of the steps, we encounter a switch …

The bulb – low-watt, energy-saving – spreads shadow, not light.

It gathers a narrow entrance lobby into view, the floor of which is strewn with woodshavings and brick fragments. Sections of plaster have chipped away from the walls, exposing shoddy Victorian masonry. Along one edge of one side of the carpet is a pile of merry-coloured supermarket bags – perhaps forty in total, traffic-light orange, Pacific blue, lime-green stripes – the plastic straining colonically against the mass of paperwork rammed inside.

If we squeeze over the rubble and past these plastic bags, we can peer through a door frame that appears to have lost its door. Wrinkle your nose. Squint your eyes. This is Simon’s basement: long, low and odoriferous.

There are so many words Simon refuses to let me use:

‘S—’ (seven letters, including a ‘q’.)

‘Too scandalous!’

‘P—’ (six letters, oink, oink.)

‘My poor mother!’

‘C—’ (seven, mild, rhymes with butter.)

‘How shaming!’

‘M—’ (six, obscure, but not to Simon; investigated by archaeologists.)

‘Stop writing immediately!’

Simon’s Banned List is a page and a half long. Our most violent argument was over the four-letter ‘f—’ word.

‘No!’ he strangulated.

I am not to use this ‘f—’

‘No!’ he wriggled.

to describe Simon’s fraction of the house under any circumstance. This word ‘f—’

‘No!’ he sank piteously to his knees.

will get him into trouble with the police.

What am I to say?

‘Rooms,’ was Simon’s genteel proffering.

‘No!’ I started from my writing chair. ‘Too polite. I’m not going to lie to my readers to that extent.’

‘You’ve shown no compunction about much greater lies elsewhere.’

‘But,’ I relaunched the argument for ‘f—’, ‘when the house was being assessed for council tax, at one stage the council maintained that it was a separate “f—”.’

‘And it would have meant a lot extra on my council tax bill. Hnnnh, I don’t want to have to go through that again, hnnh.’

‘How about “apar—”?’

‘No! No! No!’

‘Bedsit?’

‘No!’ we shrieked together, and fell about laughing.

Simon has lived in this … this … this … excavation since 1981. Once your eyes have adjusted to the gloom, you’ll see that it’s made up of two rooms: a main one, which extends the full depth of the house, thirty feet from end to end, and the 1970s school-block type of extension at the back that ends with a set of sliding doors opening onto brambles.

Now, slip on your … no, wait. I must say something first about the ‘Titanic Toilet’.

Underneath the booby-trapped stairs we just slid down to get here is a corpse – a dead and rotting lavatory bowl.

Simon was sitting on this toilet when the floor gave way. He and the crapper fell into the abyss so fast that his teeth bit his nose and he would have vanished altogether had the underside of the bowl not banged to a stop against the waste pipe and balanced there, beached, holed, the Titanic of Toilets, teetering over the centre of the earth. Simon hasn’t been able to go near the place since, except to ‘stand’. Wedging his head against the low, sloped ceiling of the stairs, clutching the washbasin with both hands, he teeters his toes to the edge of the broken woodwork – and waters the blackness.

When Simon wants ‘to sit’ he considers even my bathroom upstairs too close to the scene of trauma; he has to go to the farthest possible alternative accommodation in the house: the toilet on the top floor.

Returning to the Excavation. Now is the correct moment to slip on your steel boots, belt up with climbing robes and G-clips, grab a few plasters and a bottle of antiseptic: we’re about to enter the first cave.