The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters

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