The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters

      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