The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters
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‘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!’