The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters

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