Alexander Masters - The Genius in my Basement

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.