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 on school notepaper, cut with strangling precision around the words and folded so that the creases form a tessellation of diamonds.
Venturing your hand in farther 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 October 8, 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, 3 cm × 3 cm × 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 mold 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 percent 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 center shaded and periods 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-colored 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 windowpane, rattle yellowfly off the buddleia branches, and are beaten senseless against the coal-shed 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 potted plant, now dead, its leaves the color of pie crust, and a snapshot of two children carrying a warthog. On one side of this roo
m is a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on which everything is stored in marvelous 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 odor 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 duffel, breaks away from two Marks and Spencer’s bags oozing over his feet and barges toward 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 duffel on first, reverse his bottom into position, take a breath and make a leap backward 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 anymore. 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 duffel 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 percent, a perfect flush, and another with 99 percent, 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 duffel, 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 ema
iled 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.
Simon Page 2