# The Genius in my Basement

Alexander Masters

As Aristotle understood it, ’there is no great genius without a mixture of madness’ and he may well have had a point: Einstein routinely forgot his way home when out walking the streets of Vienna, Nietzsche wound up in an insane asylum and Bobby Fischer, the chess prodigy, now scrambles around the world, seeking residency in any country reckless enough to let him through immigration.Simon Philips Norton, the subject of Genius in my Basement, is not mad – not by a long shot – but he is certainly mixed up. At one time he was considered one of the greatest prodigies of contemporary mathematics, his breakthrough work on a group of numbers nicknamed the 'Monster' inspired and was acclaimed by the international maths community for many years. These days he spends most of his time colouring in road atlases, tracing the paths of bus routes he has travelled upon all over the country, sheltering amongst a tower of unwashed pans and eating smoked kippers straight from a tin in his 'messy' (as Simon calls it) basement flat in Cambridge.In The Genius in my Basement, Alexander Masters, the award-winning and best-selling author of Stuart: A Life Backwards, offers a tender, humorous and intimate portrait of genius at its most ordinary and at its most blurred. He enters us into the extraordinary life of one of the would-be contenders – an everyday mastermind – and in doing so, reveals the cruel burdens, as well as the glorious rewards, of a life marked by brilliance.

ALEXANDER MASTERS

The Genius in my Basement

The biography of a happy man


Dedication

For gorgeous Flora

Oh dear, I have a feeling this book

is going to be a disaster for me.

Simon Norton

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1

2 The reader meets Simon

Minus N

4

[5]

*6 The Monster

*7

45

9 eSimon

10 Mars

*11

12

*13

14

15

16 Simon Cuttlefish

*17

18

19

20 Eton

*21 3D chess

*22 Breakthrough

23 Breakdown!

24

*25 How to bag a Subgroup

26

*27 Garbage Bag Group

28

29 Great Silence

30

*31 The Monster

32 Atlas

33

34

*35 Moonshine

36 Discovery!

37

38

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Also by Alexander Masters

Copyright

About the Publisher

1


Simon was one year old, playing in the dining room, getting under his mother’s stilettos.

He was unusually thoughtful. His brothers at this age pounded the toy blocks on the glass coffee table and jabbed them into the electric sockets.

Simon picked up a pink block from the pile beside his knee and smoothed it against the carpet. Carefully, he positioned a blue brick alongside. He reached across – his mother, on her way to lay the side-plates and forks, had to make a sharp swerve – for two more pink bricks, and slid them against the blue. With precision, he extracted another blue brick.

Shuffling across the room on his bottom, Simon found four more pink bricks, fumbled them back and continued the arrangement.

His mother, halfway through folding napkins into bishops’ mitres, stopped in astonishment. She saw at last what he was doing.

One blue, one pink.

One blue, two pinks.

One blue, three pinks.

One blue, four pinks.

From the disarray of Nature, her baby son was enforcing regularity.

It took our species from the birth of prehistory to the dawn of Babylonian civilisation to learn mathematics.

Simon was bumping about its foothills in just over twelve months.

At three years, eleven months and twenty-six days, he toddled into cake-layers of long multiplication:


(January 1956)

Simon’s brother Francis had barely managed to recite the digits from one to ten by the time he was four years old; his brother Michael, a fraction quicker, had understood that if you gave him three banana-flavour milkshakes, and asked him to ‘count’ them, the correct answer was ‘one’ for the first, ‘two’ for the second and ‘three’ for the sticky splosh dribbling down his ear.

Percentages, square numbers, factors, long division, his 81 and 91 times tables, making numbers dance about to itchy tunes:


Simon mastered these when he was five.

Occasionally, his attention wandered:


2 The reader meets Simon

Sschliissh, dhuunk, dhuunk, zwaap, dhuunk, zwaap …

Listen! Can you hear?

… dhuunk, sschliissh, dhuunk, zaap, zwap, dhuunk … Bend down. Put your ear against the carpet: Zwaap, dhuunk, dhuunk, dhuunk,

zwaap, dhuunk, ssschliissh …

It’s fifty years later.

… liissh, dhuunk, dhuunk, dhuunk, zwaap, dhuunk, ssschliissh, dhunnk dhuunk, zwa ap, sclissh dhunnk, du unnk, sw

That’s the sound of a once-in-a-generation genius.

Simon Phillips Norton: Phillips, with an ‘s’, as if one Phillip were not enough to contain his brilliance. He lives under my floorboards.

Dhuunk, dhuunk …

When I first moved here, I had no idea what the noises were. Underground rivers? The next-door neighbours dragging a new pot through to their Tuscan garden? Dhuunk, dhuunk … But after eight years of interpretation I know that it’s the great man’s feet, stomping from one end of his room to the other. Every second stomp is heavier.

‘Sssschlissh’: that’s the swipe of his puffa ski-jacket against the stalagmites of paperbacks he keeps piled on the furniture.

‘Zwaap’: the sound of his holdall, as he rotates at the end of the room. He sometimes flings it wide, hitting papers. Simon carries this bag about with him everywhere he goes, clutched in the crook of his arm, even if it’s just to his front door to let in the gas man.

… dhuunk, dhuunk, dhuunk, zwaap, dhuunk, dhuunk …

Simon’s bed is ten feet directly beneath mine. My study is on top of his living room. His stomping space extends the full depth of the building, under my floor. My balcony is the roof of his basement extension, which has herded all the pretty garden plants into a six-foot square at the back of our house and stamped them under concrete slabs.

The phone rings. A charge from Simon: Dhuunk! Dhuunk! Dhuunk!

Snorting. The receiver – … rrinng, clank, clumpump, ping, ping … – wrenched from its holster. Attempts at speech, grunts, bangs of talk-noise; a strangulated word.

Clunk. Phone back in its holster.

Silence.

Dhuunk, dhuunk, dhuunk …

There’s another very important sound, which is too difficult to represent typographically: an intermittent, twisted crackle, sharp but thick, with a strong sense of command, resting on a base of plosive disorder. In an exercise book from when he was five there’s a squiggle that comes close:


It’s the sound of plastic-bag-being-opened-in-a-hurry-andthe-gratification-of-discovering-important-papers-inside. Without understanding this noise, you cannot understand the man.

… ssschliissh, dhuunk, zwaap, zwaap, dhuunk, dhuunk … Simon has been pacing down there for twenty-seven years, three months, five days, thirteen hours and eight minutes.

Ssssh!

Stop breathing!

Did you catch that?

Still another sort of noise?

A sort of sigh?

That was a thought.

Minus N

Your representation of me as interesting is

inaccurate. I feel ashamed by it.

Simon

Damn! He’s gone!


Simon’s refused to enter the book!

He is a Minus Norton. ‘Why now?’ I demanded, jumping up from the carpet when he stomped into my study from the basement. ‘The reader has started the story. He’s spent the money. He feels conned.’

‘How do you know it’s a he who’s reading it? It might be a she, hnnn.’

‘He or she! Who cares?’

‘I presume they do,’ he said cunningly.

Behind him, a bubble of air floated up the stairs and expanded into my rooms of the house, whiffing of damp and sardines.

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.

It’s easier in here to describe where the paper, plastic bags and books are not than where they are: they’re not on the ceiling.

I suppose you could say, technically, there are no papers on the top third of the walls.

A lot of it trembles in towers on the arms of chairs, on tables, on cupboards, on top of a dinner lady’s trolley that Simon’s managed to wrench out of some local school and rattle back along the midnight streets.

There are outlines of walls, outcrops suggesting a clothes cupboard, a padded chair, one, two, possibly three chests of drawers; no discernible floor; and – watch out! – an I-beam thrusting across the ceiling, indicating that, at some point in this cave’s history, primitive inhabitants have knocked out a wall, possibly during the Cambridge population explosion of the early 1900s.

Finally, here is floor.

We can rest for a moment now and take our bearings. To the right, the front of the house: a bay window, light cut off by blinds (pattern of blinds: coloured, wave-like stripes, perhaps reminding cave inhabitants of the sea). To the left: dinge.

Patterns made in the shadows by the stalagmites of plastic bags and books include a galloping cow, a beetle trying to hide under what was once the padded armchair, the face of a grotesque man …

Gullies moulded into the floor surface of paper-filled supermarket bags, envelopes, squashed boxes, fallen books, mark the route Simon takes when he stomps from his mattress to the toilet under the stairs; the toilet to the kitchen; kitchen (carrying a plate of sardines) back to mattress; then (plate and cutlery bouncing as he leaps up) mattress to front patio door, where the paper disorder gives way and a solitary rut leads through the leaves and fallen shards of masonry big enough to kill, up to the street outside our house – at which point mechanised sweepers and dustbin men take over and the trail disappears.

Amazingly, there are some good pieces of furniture here. Simon’s bed (again, to the right, beside the seascape window blinds) is a nineteenth-century mahogany antique with a Dutch gable headboard and cusped legs. How did this splendid object get in? A gift from ancient gods? It’s placed so Simon MINUS Norton can hear the postman coming up the steps to the front door of the main floor above, leap out of bed, race up the booby-trap stairs and be trembling there with his hands held in a scoop below the letterbox before the first envelope hits the floor.

An eighteenth-century twizzle-legged side table is at the other end of this first room, by the kitchen, washed up on a patch of carpet: the sort of thing found in Cotswold cottages with an arrangement of desiccated flowers sliding off the edge. This table is at an end point of Simon’s stomping route, and bears the brunt of his swinging bag when he turns. Yet somehow a giraffe-shape of paperbacks with alternating dark and light spines has managed to remain in place.

Dr Simon MINUS Norton likes to read books in a single day – packing in pages on train journeys; during delays at bus stops; between bites of sardines in tomato sauce; while floating in the bath – until he has drained the book of information, after which the broken, dog-eared volume is evicted onto a table, under a cushion, inside a saucepan, and begins a descent, measured in a timescale of years, to the archaeological strata on the floor.

Now that we’re inside this first room or cave, we can take off our climbing gear and start closer investigations. At the bottom of the giraffe pile is a ring-bound book, half an inch thick, pillarbox red, the size of a tea tray: Atlas of Finite Groups, one of the greatest mathematical publications of the second half of the twentieth century. It’s got Simon’s name on it.


Under the bed, if we push aside As the Crow Flies, by Janet Street-Porter, we find a limerick written in a tiny, bumpy hand:

A young girl of Welwyn, named Helen

Was playing near a well, and fell in

She was soaked head to toes

Was (the question arose)

Helen well in the well in Welwyn?

It’s written on exercise stationery, cut with strangling precision around the words and folded so that the creases form a tessellation of diamonds.

Venturing your hand in further under the bed – that’s it, up to the elbow – press your chin hard against that mahogany panel … there! A slipper. Look inside that: another piece of stationery, this time typed, from the Senior Tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge, dated 8 October 1969:

Dear Norton,

The Cambridge Evening News have just been on the line asking whether they could have a few words with you and have a photograph taken. I have told them that you have already been interviewed by the National Press but typically they would want to do it all again …

What’s this? The slipper is decorated with a small yellow lozenge at the toe end, showing a smiley cartoon face, the symbol for Ecstasy rave parties in the 1990s. Squashed at the end of the slipper is an envelope, crumpled, containing a thick, pressed chunk, a cake of …

Splendid! A slab of tooth impressions!


Norton’s Dentition At the age of 12.8. Fluorescent pink slab, wax, 3cm x 3cm x 0.5 cm. Excavated and photographed by the author, from a slipper.

Flicking at the plastic bags; clucking to ourselves over the titles of books piled on the armchair; scowling at the three disgraceful jackets coated in mould in the clothes cupboard – we clamber about these rooms feeling annoyance. It’s hard to put a finger on the reason for it.

It’s the vapidity of 99 per cent of this junk. If it was only totally vapid, we could dismiss the man’s life and move on. But over here, if we climb across two cubic cardboard boxes and slide down the other side of a slope of Asda bags next to this chest of drawers containing Simon’s collection of used Tango bottles from the late 1980s, is a second letter. Dated 1971, it’s typed with a heavier hand – a fierce attack on the keyboard. In places the letter ‘o’ has come with the centre shaded and full stops have pierced violently through the paper.

Dear Sir,

As you must be one of the cleverest people alive today, I wonder if you would be interested in assisting me with a project of mine. The idea is to construct an artificial language to exhibit semantic structure in much the same way as a structural chemical formula exhibits the chemical structure of a substance. The project has been examined by Professor Carnap who found it to be ‘ingenious’ …

But then look up: nothing except masses of bags stuffed full of … see! Here, a second letter in a soap-powder box. From the same man, dated eight months later:

Dear Mr Norton,

I am very sorry that you did not reply to my last letter. I suppose I must have offended you that I did not want you to plagiarize my language idea. I should like to make it clear that I did not for a moment think it likely that you would. It was just that I have reached the age of thirty four, and during that time I have been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, a form of insanity …

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.

‘And what’s wrong with Mr Fern’s mixed pickle?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never tried it. Do they do one?’

Both types of stain are the result of scraping contents from jars with a plastic spoon that is too short, and rushing the findings back on a bombing run across the sideboards to the now dead chicken. By the sink, chicken in black bean sauce has added a brown tinge.

This rancid atmosphere and the cold, soporific mood of the main rooms, together with the almost undetectable whiff of furniture polish from the paintings and mahogany items that Simon inherited following the death of his father – a homeopathic dose of plushness – combine to give the Excavation a pleasant smell. Warmed up, with perhaps a squeeze of lemon and lime shaving cream thrown in to suggest Life, it might even be cosy.

All the same, it’s easy to get carried away by this bomb site. Simon isn’t universally messy, even outside his head. He’s as fussy as a surgeon when it comes to planning a journey. He manages two homes (he has a flat in London), has a turnover of satisfied tenants, and is never behind with bills, legal documents or financial dealings with his accountant. None of these is true of me. In addition, his transport newsletter comes out once every three or four months, is twelve to sixteen pages long, single-space, eight-point type, covers hundreds if not thousands of unfailingly accurate details about new routes, closures and timetables, and keeps careful account of all local outrages by the government Highways Agency. When Simon wants there to be order, he’s unmatchable. When not, a colostomy bag is not more disgusting. Simon insists that this basement is his catalogue: all it needs is pruning, sorting out, filing, and it will be an invaluable library of documentation.


A list, from 1992, of a few of the bus and train journeys Simon made that year. He has a pile of such lists, over a foot high.

‘A documentation of what, exactly?’ I ask while he sits down to his supper.

‘Where I’ve been?’ he suggests.

I call it his middenheap. These papers are just bones: all that is left after Simon’s banquet on their information relating to buses and trains: the public-transport detritus of a monstrous feast on facts that began when he was three.

‘How about if I take the focus of the story off the floor and into the air?’ I suggest breezily, returning to the battle. ‘“One of the greatest mathematical geniuses of the twentieth century lives beneath my floorboards,” I could begin, “in the dank, foetid gloom of his subterranean …”’

‘No.’

‘Not dank?’

‘No.’

‘Or foetid?’

He shakes his head.

‘How about miasmic? I quite like miasmic. It sounds poetic.’

Also no good: ‘Ungh-ungh.’

I take a deep breath, slowly let out air, and reach across for Simon’s thesaurus. ‘Ponging?’

*6 The Monster

(Mathematical chapters in this book are quarantined by a *)

That’s the name of Simon’s special area in mathematics, because of its gargantuan complexity and fiery insight into the fundamental structure of our universe.

No one knows what the Monster looks like. It can be detected only through its mathematical traces. Like shadows and ghosts, it inhabits a penumbral landscape between abstraction and solidity.

The Monster belongs to an area of mathematics known as Group Theory, or the study of symmetry.

Groups are represented in textbooks by tiresome grids of numbers similar to sudoku tables, yet they are among the most startling investigative tools in human thought. Quantum Theory, Relativity Theory, predictions about the number and types of sub-atomic particles, the codes used to scramble military and financial information – all of it fundamentally reliant on the study of Groups. They have even been used to investigate incest among Aboriginal tribes.

A sudoku table has nine rows and nine columns of numbers.

The Monster has 8080174247945128758864599049617107 57005754368000000000.

*7


Introducing

To understand Simon’s particular genius – how it developed and why for a few years he led the braying pack of mathematicians hunting down the Monster – the reader needs to know about squares.

On the face of it, the study of symmetries is a subject for children. A square has symmetry: you can rotate it, and the result looks just as if you’d done nothing at all:


The same goes for an equal-sided triangle:


A circle, cube, sphere, and a host of other shapes with names like dodecadodecahedron (twenty-four faces) and icosidodecadodecahedron (forty-four faces) each has similar symmetrical properties.

In order to develop mathematics out of such simple stuff, we have to keep a diary of these symmetries.

For example, to keep track of these four moves, we can represent them like this:


Note that there’s a sense of self-containment about this set of operations. A square has four sides and therefore only four distinct ways of rotating. After that, you’ve exhausted all the possibilities. No amount of rotating will paint it green or puff it up to twice its original size. Other operations are needed to perform that sort of thing.

If we rotate a square in any of the above four ways, it still looks to the outsider just like the square we started with:


But, privately, we know we’ve been fiddling. For example, if we rotate a square through two turns (i.e. flip it head over heels), we can represent this:


In other words,


signifies the act of swivelling a square through two 90-degree turns, without anybody noticing.

Naturally, if you turn a square by one turn through 90 degrees, then do it again, that’s the equivalent of two 90-degree turns overall:


1 + 1 = 2

Similarly, rotate a square once, followed by two more turns, and the result is equivalent to three turns. You’ve almost gone the whole way round:


1 + 2 = 3

And so on. Rotate a square by two turns, then do nothing, go off and play with somebody else’s crayons, and no one’s going to be fooled – it’s still just two turns:


2 + 0 = 2

A square looks just the same after any combination of these operations, or all of them:


The figures with arms and legs are simply diary entries to keep track of the secret things we’ve been doing to the square in the playpen.

What happens if we turn a square, say, five times? That’s the equivalent of spinning it through a full cycle, then throwing in an extra single turn for good measure:


Group Theory isn’t interested in recording such clever-clogs stuff. Turn a square round five times and you might as well just have turned it once. It’s the final outcome only that matters, so it’s put down as an ordinary single turn:


So, although it seems possible that:


3 + 2 = 5

because the first four turns make a complete rotation, head over heels, back exactly to where we started, we ignore them as wasted effort, and just focus on the one left-over turn, which got us somewhere:


3 + 2 = 1

In this respect, rotating a square is the same as rotating the hour hand on an ordinary clockface. If it’s two o’clock and we add twelve hours, we don’t say it’s fourteen o’clock (unless we’re being tiresome). We say it’s two o’clock again.

All these combinations of turns can now be written down as a chart. These tables are the lifeblood of Group Theory. Every mystery of this secretive, sly subject is contained in them. The one that applies to turns of a square is:


It’s read in the same way as the distance chart at the front of a road atlas. It’s not a calculating device; it’s a secretarial way of keeping track of information. If you’re six years old and want to remind yourself what happens when you turn a square once, then turn it again, i.e.:


take the row corresponding to 1, run your chocolatey finger along until you come to the column corresponding to 1, and there’s the answer – it’s equivalent to two turns:


What’s baffling is that there can be anything complicated enough about this ‘study’ of symmetries to bring it out of the playroom in the first place.

45

The papers that slosh about in the basement are (Simon insists I am to say) ‘carefully, hnnnh, arranged and, uuuh, being sorted in plastic bags’.

But I’ve put my foot down over this: ‘That’s a lie, Simon. You’re telling me to make things up.’

‘I’ve not noticed your reluctance on that front before.’

Simon was taught mathematics by the number 45.

The first written evidence we have of 45’s significance in his life comes from an Atlantic blue notebook dated January 1956 (a year before Simon started school) and entitled


Inside, Simon addresses mathematical problems to this number:


(sums for 45, you 45)

performs amusing numerical games:


and emerges briefly, porpoise-like, from his researches to write letters to her:


Translation: My darling 45 I cried when you went out I had tea and played with you before you go 45 and 47 29 say 1 2 3 82 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 111

before re-submerging in a glug of numbers.

Sometimes, 45 wrote back:


45 was Simon’s number for his mother. She was the one who taught him maths, up to quadratic equations. Astounding, for a British housewife in the 1950s – no one in the family can explain it.

Once the first Atlantic blue notebook was finished, Simon and his mother started another, in February 1956, just before his fourth birthday. Her handwriting is on the cover this time, and she calls him a monkey:


I wonder who crossed this fondness out.

Once, during these pre-school years, Simon was distracted by a word:


But he soon snapped back to numbers with gusto:


9 eSimon


Simon has five types of grunt:

Ask him about his mother,


his father,


or his parents’ marriage,


and you get a happy grunt for the first, a puzzled one for the second, and an incomprehensible bleat concerning the photo above.

It’s possible to extract more interpretation, if you work at it.

‘Simon, what do you mean, “Uuugheugh … gghuaha … ehhghH”?’

‘Haaaghuggh … oooh … ghughghEH.’

‘These are your parents. You grew up with them. Is this photo an accurate reflection of their relationship or not?’

‘Aaaghurghh … gghahuugh … eeehghuGH … is that a dog in the middle? Oh, it’s a bag. If it had been a dog these might not have been my parents, just people who looked like my parents, because we didn’t have a dog.’

‘Don’t you think there’s something remarkable about this picture? Sitting back to back on a pebble beach in Southern England with something that looks like a dead bulldog between you?’

Simon looks trapped and panicky.

‘Or is this just a snapshot of what marriage always is, to you?’

The grunt-bleat means bafflement. Why should he find something odd about the photograph? It’s a photograph: one of those things (so rare in life) in which a fact is made immutable. Why muddy it with interpretation? Why, if you do muddy it, pick on that particular interpretation? It could be one of a million others.

Simon is, verbally, one of the most adept and playful people I know – as long as he doesn’t have to speak.

Or use metaphor.

Or comment on photographs.

Simon’s parents’ marriage (according to other members of the family) was not happy or unhappy, just mannered and soulless.

The puzzled father-grunt Simon gives about his father signifies a lack of interest. The happy mother-grunt, ‘loveliness’. Loveliness is the only adjective Simon associates with Helene Norton. She ‘embodied’ the word, he says. There isn’t need for others – and he doesn’t mean ‘loveliness’ because of her startling beauty, which Simon claims he’d never noticed until I started ogling her, but ‘loveliness’ because of … because of … uuuggghhhAH! Grunt Number Four: Frustrated Grunt.

What’s the point of me demanding new words when he’s already given me the one that works to perfection?

‘Loveliness’ does not mean uncensoriousness, however. When his mother was alive, Simon used to visit her in London every two or three weeks, but she refused to greet him until he’d had a bath.

Then she would criticise his clothes.

‘If it wasn’t one thing, it was another,’ remembers Simon forlornly. ‘I got the feeling I could never satisfy her. Did it count if your clothes were wrong in the period before you’d had a chance to spruce up between the front door and the bath?’

After trying to ‘spruce up’ he’d step out of the bathroom in the fresh clothes that his mother kept in a cupboard, ready for his visits, and expecting now to be allowed to kiss her hello. ‘But I’d almost certainly forget something, and she’d draw attention to that one thing and home in on it. My shirt was wrong, or my shoelaces were undone. I hadn’t done up my trousers correctly.’

He gives a purgatorial groan.

‘It was too much for me.’

Two or three days after his mother’s death (Simon remembers it as ‘rather too quickly’) he and his two brothers let themselves into her five-bedroom apartment near Baker Street, and began picking over her possessions. From their mother’s cupboards and drawers they extracted everything small and unbreakable and piled it on the floor. Then they shuffled among the piles – in my image of this spectral, sacrificial scene I imagine them as three tall birds, and hear the clicking of their feet on the parquet floors – plucking up anything that took their fancy.

There was only one item Simon wanted: a photograph of his mother in old age.

There were paintings of her, when she was young and glorious. Simon wasn’t interested. He’d had nothing to do with her in those days. He doesn’t like portraits at the best of times, but he prefers at least that they correlate to an image already in his brain.

He held out his arms, eyes closed, to any other things the brothers didn’t take , then brought the fifty-or-sixty-item windfall back to a small flat he owns in London. There he laid them out, ten layers deep along one edge of the living room, like drying fish fillets.

Simon tells me he would like to hang the pictures up.

His mother has been dead nine years now, but the haul remains stacked against the wall, curing itself slowly of connotations. ‘Loveliness’ now resides only in the photograph of her old age and his memories.

The leftovers in his mother’s apartment – her letters, wrapped in pink ribbon, from a man who was not Simon’s father; her skirts and chemises, brooches, diamond pins, fur coats, perfumes, old swing-band records – the brothers sold, gave away or threw in the dustbin.


‘But you also got all your old school reports and exercise books, and the folder of newspaper clippings about when you won the Maths Olympiads and went to Cambridge, your IQ report?’

‘As I say, I didn’t want them.’

‘Then why take them?’

‘Why not take them?’

Simon is always eager to drop in schoolboyish retorts like this. The trick is to become instantly absurd.

‘Would you have taken them had they been roast chickens?’

‘Heh, heh, heh, hnnn. I took them because it’s the sort of thing people do take, isn’t it?’

See? Simple, when you know how.

To Simon, correct conduct is like a wood. It has many trees, which represent how things ought to be done; one tree for each circumstance. It is a large wood, sterile and rather dark. The stormy forest where he goes to hunt for the Monster is infinitely more comforting.

Here’s Simon’s brother!

Hello, Michael!


He doesn’t have much to say.

‘Is it surprising?’ he protests, leaping up, holding out his hand – a strong shake. ‘I’m ten years older than Simon is. We were like different families. I studied chemistry at university, not mathematics; that’s a different language. Simon is interested in chemistry also? Really? I never knew. His favourite element is Boron? I’m surprised! Would you like some tea? Organic Lapsang or elderflower?’

Michael Norton OBE is the author of Writing Better Fundraising Applications, The WorldWide Fundraiser’s Handbook, The Complete Fundraising Handbook and Getting Started in Fundraising. Money – in particular other people’s money – is a big subject in Michael’s life. He wants it to pay for environmental revolution.

His latest book is 365 Ways to Change the World: How to Make a Better World Every Day. Each day of the year is allocated a noble deed:

5 January: ‘Start drinking.’ Reduce ‘beer miles’ by giving up sewage brands like Heineken or Budweiser, and brew your own beer using oysters and wild rice.

22 February: ‘Say no to plastic bags.’ There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic waste in every square mile of the world’s oceans. In Australia, eighty million plastic bags are added every year to the mist of garbage that floats across the scrub there. Cows eat them and die; then the sack re-emerges from the rotting flesh, is cleaned off by rain, scooped back up by wind, and bundled along to be eaten by another cow: it is, biologically speaking, a protovirus. Simon is therefore a force for salvation. He keeps these viruses out of reach. If it weren’t for him, thousands of extra plastic bags from the Excavation would be tumbling through our fields and woodlands.

1 May: ‘Join the sex workers’ union.’ Fight to give prostitutes access to health care, safe places to work and legal support against rapists and pervy Italian prime ministers. ‘Membership is free.’

‘Michael Norton is a one-man “ideas factory”,’ bellows the Guardian.

‘You know, he knows when he comes to dinner here dressed in a dirty T-shirt that he’s doing wrong,’ says Michael, stooping under the lintel of his cottage door (he lives in Hampstead, but the house looks as if it’s been airlifted from beside a village brook in Hampshire) and balancing a tea tray. ‘But there’s no point telling him. You’d physically have to burn his old clothes before he’d get rid of them.’

He’s brought a photograph album into the garden along with the Victoria sponge cake. The album’s green, with a cushioned cover, from 1954, and it’s all the paperwork Michael has that includes Simon. They are not a sentimental family.


‘That’s my hand at the edge there, sorting out his food, even at that age. We’re at our summer bungalow in Ferring. This is David …’. David is a friend who later murdered his wife by bludgeoning her to death with a champagne bottle:


‘And here’s Simon aged … oh dear, not a pleasant-looking young man’:


‘Our mother doted on Simon. She was really proud that he was a genius. I don’t think she ever understood why he didn’t sustain that. I mean, he sustained it in his brain, but why is he not a professor? Why has he not got a proper job?’

‘He’s too peculiar,’ I suggest.

‘He’s not that peculiar,’ retorts Michael sharply, catching me out, correctly, in one of the phrases I have lately come to use about Simon without thinking. ‘There are lots of peculiar people in Cambridge. Half the dons that I had as a student there were peculiar. There must be somewhere that would give him a home.’

He taps his china cup of elderflower irritably.

‘All I can say is that since our mother died, Simon’s become a different person. I noticed that almost immediately. He’s got more sociable. When he comes to dinner, he’s much more at ease. Instead of sitting in a corner reading a book as he did when she was alive, he joins in. I’ve bought him three clean shirts which hang in a wardrobe here, for him to pick up whenever he comes to London.

‘I think my biggest triumph is persuading him to get rid of his money. Did you know, he gives £10,000 a year to campaign against cars?’

Francis Norton, Simon’s middle brother, works here …


… in a jewellery shop.

Francis brings in the family money. The company, founded by Simon’s great-grandfather, is the oldest family-run antique jewellery business in the world, patronised by the Queen, pop stars, fringe aristocracy, footballers (if they know what they’re about) and all London people with 100-acre second homes in Wiltshire.

Ten years before Simon was born, S.J. Phillips established itself as the epitome of Englishness by taking part in a famous wartime deception called Operation Mincemeat, later dramatised in the film The Man Who Never Was.

In April 1943, a Spanish fisherman discovered the decomposing corpse of a man floating off the coast of Andalusia. Documents on the body identified him as Major (Acting) William Martin of the Royal Marines. He was handcuffed to a briefcase, which contained a bunch of keys, an expired military pass, two passionate love letters, a picture of a woman in a swimming costume (‘Bill darling, don’t let them send you off into the blue the horrible way they do’), a £53 bill for an engagement ring and a letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten to General Alexander revealing the plans for the Allied invasion of Europe.

Spain, though neutral, supported a very efficient network of German agents. They soon found out about the drowned Marine, got hold of the briefcase and carefully extracted the top-secret letter from its envelope. The British had made the greatest intelligence blunder of the Second World War. With ample time to prepare his defences, Hitler now knew that the Allies were going to invade Europe through Sardinia and the Peloponnesus: the Germans transferred the 1st Panzer Division to Greece and started laying minefields.

It wasn’t until the British got the corpse of Major (Acting) Martin back, a fortnight later, that they knew the Nazis had definitely fallen for the trick. British Intelligence had folded the fake letter to Mountbatten only once before sliding Martin’s dead body into the sea from a submarine off the coast. When the body and effects were returned, investigators spotted under

Excerpt from an interview with Francis and his wife, Amanda

Amanda: When I met the Norton family, I thought they were all so bizarre.

Francis (nodding): My mother was very, very old-fashioned. It was, you know, ‘It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, you can go see your mother.’ We absolutely adored her.

Amanda: They were just so Victorian. I’d never met anything like it in my life.

Francis: My father always said his ideal was to have a tail-coated butler behind every chair.

Amanda: I’ve never known parents who were so unphysical. In the morning Helene, their mother, would go off and do her charity work, then come home and have a long cigarette, put on her kaftan for the afternoon, and sit there doing the crossword puzzle.

Francis: Terribly unfulfilled.

Amanda: I remember once – this is how old-fashioned they were – I’d just had my son Alexander, he was about nine months old, and Dick [Simon and Francis’s father] was standing there, with the table laid with all the silver, and Domingo the butler hovering around. And Dick looks at me and says, ‘Amanda, darling, has Alexander started masticating yet?’

a microscope that the letter had been carefully refolded, creating a second crease.

A month later, Britain and America began their assault 300 miles west of the location indicated in the letter, though Sicily.

S.J. Phillips, Simon’s family firm, provided the £53 engagement-ring bill – it was seen as the touch that the Germans would regard as unfakably, quintessentially English.

Francis is Simon’s saviour. It’s because Francis keeps the family firm alive and profitable that Simon has never had to have a job or a mortgage and, despite using seventeen different variants of bus, train and visitor-attraction discount cards, doesn’t actually need a single one of them.

A mild, self-effacing, apparently undogmatic man (I’ve met him only twice), Francis lives on the other side of Hampstead from brother Michael, and has the talcum-powder-dusted look of the very rich. He is an accomplished cellist.

Every year Francis or Michael invite Simon to their house for Passover; and every year Simon arrives with his shoelaces flapping, his holdall bulging, his bus timetables and his smells, and eats all the parsley.

Now, back to grunts.

The fifth type of grunt emitted by Simon is metaphorical – it’s not a guttural sound, it’s a full sentence. The mathematician Professor John Conway calls it a ‘Thank you, Simon’, defined as ‘a statement that is indubitably true, but the relevance of which is obscure’. For example, in the middle of a discussion with me about whether the Monster might in fact not be a large object at all, but something very small and everywhere, like a flea, Simon will burst out:

‘Incidentally, I was once going on a train and the conductor pronounced that we were now approaching “Manea, the centre of the universe”.’

What can you say after he’s said that? What does he mean? That the flea-Monster, which Simon suspects contains the solution to the symmetry of the universe, is living in Manea, a village in the Cambridgeshire Fens? It can’t be that. Simon is not a lunatic. Maybe it’s just the word, ‘universe’. But he clearly expects some sort of reply. So, after a suitable pause, you murmur, with a slight doff of the head,

‘Thank you, Simon.’

Then you attempt to pick up the pieces of the shattered conversation.

It’s important to realise that this fifth type of grunt never comes about because Simon isn’t able to keep up with the discussion, or because his brain has short-circuited and popped out the non-sequitur in a fizz of misfired neurons. They appear for the opposite reason: he has dashed too far ahead, gone off on a side path, left the ponderous, sequential-talking rest of us behind, raced up into the hills of puns and synonyms and humorous, leapingly interconnected memories … then jumped back with the result, waving his arms and grinning in triumph, like a child ambushing us from behind a tree.

As the fact dawns on Simon that no one has the foggiest idea what he’s talking about, he is not resentful. Politely, he allows the intensity of his grin to slip away. Measuredly, he rejoins the conversation.

(1) Happy, (2) puzzled, (3) incomprehensible, (4) frustrated, (5) phrasal (‘Thank you, Simons’). Sometimes, Simon will go for weeks without offering anything to his biographer but one of these five grunts.

And then, PING!

An email comes.

And behind the grunts, a man.

Monday, February 8th, 9.19pm

I’m sorry, I can’t make head or tail of the last chapter you sent me. I think that any reader who shares my way of thinking will be completely bewildered.

Tuesday, February 9th, 1.17am

I can’t follow the thread of your writing. If I were someone I didn’t know rather than myself, I suspect that in reading it I would have problems following the story even if I could understand the sentences. Incidentally, this is not something I’d say with your previous book. There I could understand your description of Stuart, my problem was you gave me no motivation to understand his character.

Wednesday, February 10th, 12.32am

I’m not sure what you mean [in Chapter 10] by my ‘jocular’ attitude to mathematics, but never mind. You’ve got the calculations wrong – 28 is 256, not 4096, which is 212, and the others are similarly shifted. I don’t understand your bit about numbers floating in the sky. No, I haven’t a clue whether it was a right or left leg that the duck was missing.

[This is followed by fifty-two lines explaining the story of the legless duck, which also includes a self-playing piano, an inferno in the Channel Tunnel, admission that he reads a magazine called Cruising Monthly, and a threat of imprisonment by gas inspectors.]

Wednesday, February 10th, 12.48am

I know what the word ‘jocular’ means. What I don’t know is what you mean when you describe my love of mathematics as jocular, I might be jocular, but how can my love of mathematics be? I don’t know what you mean by a ‘Rabelaisian’ series (and don’t say ‘in the style of Rabelais’!). However, unlike you I do know how to spell the word.

eSimon, the Simon who logs on to his computer at one in the morning, is a different man to Simon the grunter: eloquent, fluent, conversational, reflective, poignant, sometimes funny and – if the subject matter has anything to do with my attempts to understand genius, popularise mathematics or write biography – acerbic.

Simon’s interview with Kevin, resident of Cambourne, in 2016 (An example of Simon’s clear, fluent, amusing writing style. Abridged from an editorial (2006) in his Public Transport Newsletter, which he writes and publishes three or four times a year.)

Q: What decided you to move to Cambourne (a village outside Cambridge)?

A: We chose Cambourne because there was a direct bus link to my job in Papworth, and we could also get buses to St Neots for trains to London. It also seemed a good place for my wife’s ageing parents. And we hoped our house would be a good investment – its value would have gone up had the east–west rail link been built close to the A428, as recommended by the London-South Midlands Multi-Modal Study.

Q: But I gather things then went sour.

A: Yes. In 2005 the bus links to Papworth and St Neots were reduced, and I found I had to cycle in most days. The main road was very unpleasant, and the side route via Elsworth took twice as long. Then in 2006 came the Council’s budget cuts to buses. In 2007 the A428 dual carriageway opened, our road became an ‘overspill A14’, and Madingley Road became clogged, making our buses increasingly erratic.

Q: But things are better now, aren’t they?

A: Yes, in one sense. The big stores left the city centre because they realised people didn’t want to have to put up with gridlock every time they went shopping. But there’s the downside that it’s now much harder to get to the shops by public transport. Nor could we use internet shopping as there was rarely anyone in the house to accept deliveries, apart from my mother-in-law who was often asleep, and even when she was awake she could never get to the door on time.

Q: How have your family been coping?

A: My father-in-law died in the bird flu epidemic. My mother-in-law has become increasingly frail. Visiting the children in Oxford and London is a problem – the bus to Oxford has been taking ever longer because of growing congestion, and it’s a long walk from the city centre to the rail station. For a time we tried the coach, but then they moved the coach terminal to the rail station too …

Q: Have you ever thought of buying a car?

A: Yes, often. But then we’d ask, how could we face our children knowing we’d helped to ruin the world for them? Our generation has badly betrayed our children’s.

Q: I gather you’re leaving Cambourne soon?

A: Yes, we’ll move to London or Oxford as soon as we’ve settled on a place for my mother-in-law. Good riddance – to the Cambridge area I mean, of course!

see www.cambsbettertransport.org.uk/newsletter93.html for the full version.

10 Mars

People do sometimes tell me how nice I am looking (e.g. at my mother’s funeral) when I wear new clothes, but it always makes me feel very embarrassed. I say, ‘I don’t want to know that.’ I don’t want to be thought of as someone for whom personal appearance is important.

Simon

‘I’m going to see a Martian. He aaah, hnnn … it lives in Woking.’

Simon blocked my sun, his holdall swinging slowly to a stop after his unexpected rush off the pavement at my café table.

‘Hnnn, aaah, uugh. As I say, my grandmother lived where the Martian is. Hnnnh. Would you like to come too?’ Spring on earth! Simon giving me encouragement!

I jumped up, swigged back my coffee and gathered my books and notes. A ballyhoo of cherry blossom leapt about the wall of Darwin College Fellows’ Garden. Dead-looking trees creaked out of the sodden grass, sprouted buds and crackled quickly into the sky.

I’d been working on a cartoon about the origin of numbers.

In the late 1970s a young French woman called Denise Schmandt-Berserat made an astonishing discovery. Forgotten in the storeroom of the Fogg Museum of Art in Harvard


was a prehistoric clay purse


from the ancient city of Nuzi,


in the country now called


Iraq.

‘Uuuugh, aah, errr … oh dear!’ Simon blustered. ‘What is the point of this? I don’t understand pictures.’

‘It’s the origin of your subject. The purse had an inscription on it that said it was the property of Ziqarru, a shepherd, and contained forty-nine “counters representing small cattle”. Not that that impressed the Harvard excavators any more than it does you. They broke the seal, found the forty-nine clay pebbles inside, as promised – and lost them.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘Exactly. But this French scholar realised that Ziqarru’s egg-shaped purse was a simple accounting device, from the dawn of writing. People had discovered other egg-shaped purses containing counters before, but none with symbols on the outside like this. It was the earliest known attempt to symbolise the contents of the purse with abstract marks. According to her, it was the need, by palace accountants, to keep track of animal numbers that led to the invention of writing and mathematics. If someone who understood the new marks thought Ziqarru had been stealing animals, all they had to do was check the writing on the outside. And if Ziqarru suspected that person of using the newfangled cuneiform to cheat him, he could break open the purse and prove he was innocent by counting the flock off against the pebbles inside. Lo! Symbolic writing had begun. Next thing you know, it’s algebra, calculus and Shakespeare. Writing comes from mathematics, in short, and it all comes from accountancy.’

‘Oh, DEAR!’

‘Why “Oh dear!” this time?’

‘No reason,’ sighed Simon morosely, and unbent his elbow.

The handles of his holdall rippled down the forearm of his puffa jacket and the bag dropped to the pavement.

‘Excuse me!’ he gnashed. ‘I’d like to sit down. Can you remove all this paper?’ As he hit the seat he jolted into a better temper.

Simon’s most famous ancestor was the Prophet Abraham, of Ur of the Chaldees. Then came Joseph, of the Coat of Many Colours. His son was Manasseh, first mentioned in Genesis, who led one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Next follows 3,000 years of forgetfulness before the family pops back into life on a rolled-up poster in the back room of Simon’s Excavation – two shelves along and one up from the television-that-might-have-broken-twenty-years-ago-but-possibly-it’s-only-a-fuse:

ASLAN MANASSEH

b. Bombay 1884

m

KITTY MEYER

b. Calcutta 1891

The Manassehs are the leading family of the oldest settled community of people in recorded history: the Iraqi Jews of Babylon, 150 miles from Nuzi and Ziqarru’s purse.

Congratulating myself on my willingness to be at the coalface of biographical reportage and, at a moment’s notice, drop everything and go to Woking, I walked with Simon from the café, across the park . ‘The Martian’ turned out to be a statue in honour of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. According to a tourist leaflet Simon eventually discovered in his coat pocket, it’s seven metres high. It looks like a beetle trying to curtsey with its legs stuck in vacuum tubes. There’s also a Woking Spaceship embedded in the pavement nearby, and Woking Bacteria, made out of splodges of coloured concrete brick.

Battling a wallet from his trousers pocket, in the centre of Cambridge Simon boarded a bus to the railway station. He muttered out coins into the driver’s cash tray, seized the ticket, held it to the light to investigate it with narrowed eyes, then made for a free space at the back of the bus, bouncing his holdall from ear to ear of the seated passengers.

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.

Sixty years later, a man in London offered a million pounds to any breeding Iraqi Jewish couple who would go out to Baghdad to repopulate the city. ‘I have a friend who’s interested,’ I enthused to Simon. ‘What do you think? Her name’s Samantha.’

‘I dislike the name Samantha, so anyone with that name would be unlikely to attract me. Maybe it’s because it makes me think of Samantha Fox, the pornography star … I may say, I do have a relation with a Samantha. She deals with my tax affairs.’

Simon settled into a dead-eyed stare, gave himself a hug with his elbows and went back to looking out of the window: a quiet, euphoric gesture. Until we were on the train, he could devote his entire attention to ignoring me.

Higher up Simon’s genealogical poster, closer to the rustle of the Old Testament, the children are nameless, lives are replaced by question marks, but deaths are biblical: a sister to Habebah, ‘drowned in the Euphrates’; Sassoon Aslan, ‘buried in Basra’; Minahem Aslan, ‘childless, in Jerusalem’. Before that, Simon’s family disappears off the top of the page into the Mesopotamian sand dunes.

At the train station, Simon jolted off the bus to the fast ticket machine in the concourse and pressed screen after screen of glowing virtual buttons. Once he’d finally amassed all our possible discounts, off-peak fares, and unexpected mid-journey changes to thwart the local train operators’ pricing structures, he stared for a minute at the screen, which was demanding to know how many passengers apart from himself were taking the trip.

‘0’ pressed Simon, and looked up at me without crossness or dismissal.

Together, Aslan and Kitty Manasseh had five children, spaced every two years: Maurice, whose wife sneaked off one day when he was out and had herself sterilised; Nina, an old maid; Lilian, who ended up ‘in Blanchard’s antique shop’ …

(‘Do you mean she was for sale, Simon?’ ‘No! Of course not, he, he he.’)

… in Winchester, childless; Helene, Simon’s mother (Gaia among women in that barren setting, because she had three boys); and Violet, a war widow, who added another boy. This man, Simon’s first cousin, goes by the name of David Battleaxe.

‘You mean he was christened that?’ I perked up.

‘Not christened, although we do celebrate Christmas. He’s Jewish. We’re all Jewish,’ replied Simon. We were on the train now, hurrying down the aisle.

‘David Battleaxe …?’

‘After a racehorse.’

‘A racehorse?’ I puffed.

‘In Calcutta.’

‘In Calcutta?’

‘One of my grandfather’s,’ said Simon, then lunged left and landed with a thump in a window seat, his bag arriving on his lap – crucccnchch – a split-second after.

‘So you do know something about your grandfather,’ I observed, squeezing past two beer cans into the rear-facing seat opposite, next to the toilet. ‘He kept racehorses and named his grandson after a stallion. Yet when I asked you what your grandfather did just now, you said you didn’t know.’

‘You asked me what he traded, and I said I didn’t remember.’

The train pulled away, clacked across various points until it found the London tracks, and mumbled past the Cityboy apartments with tin-can Juliet balconies.

‘I don’t think he did trade horses,’ resumed Simon, as we picked up speed towards the Gog Magog hills. ‘Therefore I did not feel that it was relevant to provide that as an answer.’

A conductor hurried up to us, clicking his puncher, jutting his chin across seat columns, and demanded tickets and railcards.

Simon had his wallet already prepared, bunched in his fist, and offered up his pass and all the other necessary pieces of coloured cardboard in a derangement of eagerness. So many, the man needed an extra hand to deal with it all: the outward from Cambridge to Wimbledon via Clapham Junction and Willesden Junction covered by one set of reduced-fare permits; a continued discount outward from Wimbledon to Woking, with ‘appropriate alternative documentation’. As the conductor sifted through these triumphs of cunning, Simon’s face was suffused with expectation. The man adopted a bored expression and punched whatever suited him with a machine that pinched the paper hard and left behind purple bumps. Simon snatched the pile back and studied the undulations with satisfaction.

Another cousin I’d noticed on the family tree was called ‘Bonewit’. This woman appears on the fecund side of the family. It’s difficult to count the tiny layers of type on that half of the poster: seven children to Joseph and Regina; eight to Isaac Shellim and Ammam; ten – no, twelve – wait, my finger’s too fat for the tiny letters, eleven – to Shima and Manasseh: Aaron, Hababah, Ezekiel, Benjamin, David, Hannah, Esther … a rat-a-tat from the Pentateuch. Fifteen kids! to Sarah and Moses David. By the time they got to Gretha Bonewit, their seed was worn out.

‘Bonewit?’ said Simon, interrupting. ‘“Wit” is Dutch for “white”. I’ve got a Dutch dictionary in here.’

As the train passed Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Simon’s attention swerved, to gout. Jolting his hand out of the foreign-dictionary sector of his holdall, he sank it back in six inches further along and two inches to the right, and extracted a scrunched-up Tesco bag containing tablets. Allopurinol, for gout; Voltarol, for swelling (though it’s bad for his kidneys); Atenolol for blood thinning. He washed a selection down with more passionfruit juice and returned to dictionary-hunting.

‘Simon, why have you got a Dutch dictionary?’

‘Why shouldn’t I have a Dutch dictionary?’

‘Do you have a Mongolian dictionary?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have a dictionary for roast chickens?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then, why a Dutch one?’


Simon’s mother, grandfather Aslan (far right) and Battleaxe.

‘Because,’ he honked, triumphant that the answer had got such assiduous courting, ‘I …’ But at this point he found the book in question and pulled it out. ‘Let’s see, aaaah, hnnnn, bonewit, bone, bon … ooh …’ – his eyes lit up – ‘… it means “ticket voucher”.’

Simon will rot his floorboards with bathwater, immure his kitchen surfaces in Mr Patak’s mixed pickle and hack his hair off with a kitchen knife, but he is never unkind to maps. Returning the dictionary, Simon burrowed a foot and a half to the left and cosseted out an Ordnance Survey ‘Landranger’. He shook it into a sail-sized billow of paper, then pressed it gently into manageable shape.

Outside, the rain was frenzied. It clattered against the roof and ran in urgent, buffeted streaks along the glass. The flat lands of Cambridgeshire swelled up into a wave of hills.

When I looked back at Simon, a banana had appeared in his hand.

‘Right, your granny. Why did she live in Woking, but your grandfather stayed in Calcutta?’

‘I have no idea.’ Simon looked up from his map and considered the point. ‘Isn’t that the sort of thing married couples do?’

‘Was there a huge argument?’

‘No, oh dear, I don’t know.’

‘Did he have a harem?’

‘Huuunh. Should he have?’

Ordinarily, I like to record all interviews, because it’s not just the words that count, but the hesitations and silences. But this opportunity had occurred without notice, and I didn’t have my voice recorder.

I decided ‘Hnnn’, ‘Uuugh’ and ‘Aaah’ should be noted as ‘H’, ‘U’ and ‘A’. Stage directions ‘pained’, ‘dead-eyed’ and ‘yawning’ to be added as appropriate.

‘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.

‘Bamboo?’

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.