The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters
(six letters, oink, oink.)
‘My poor mother!’
‘C—’ (seven, mild, rhymes with butter.)
‘How shaming!’
‘M—’ (six, obscure, but not to Simon; investigated by archaeologists.)
‘Stop writing immediately!’
Simon’s Banned List is a page and a half long. Our most violent argument was over the four-letter ‘f—’ word.
‘No!’ he strangulated.
I am not to use this ‘f—’
‘No!’ he wriggled.
to describe Simon’s fraction of the house under any circumstance. This word ‘f—’
‘No!’ he sank piteously to his knees.
will get him into trouble with the police.
What am I to say?
‘Rooms,’ was Simon’s genteel proffering.
‘No!’ I started from my writing chair. ‘Too polite. I’m not going to lie to my readers to that extent.’
‘You’ve shown no compunction about much greater lies elsewhere.’
‘But,’ I relaunched the argument for ‘f—’, ‘when the house was being assessed for council tax, at one stage the council maintained that it was a separate “f—”.’
‘And it would have meant a lot extra on my council tax bill. Hnnnh, I don’t want to have to go through that again, hnnh.’
‘How about “apar—”?’
‘No! No! No!’
‘Bedsit?’
‘No!’ we shrieked together, and fell about laughing.
Simon has lived in this … this … this … excavation since 1981. Once your eyes have adjusted to the gloom, you’ll see that it’s made up of two rooms: a main one, which extends the full depth of the house, thirty feet from end to end, and the 1970s school-block type of extension at the back that ends with a set of sliding doors opening onto brambles.
Now, slip on your … no, wait. I must say something first about the ‘Titanic Toilet’.
Underneath the booby-trapped stairs we just slid down to get here is a corpse – a dead and rotting lavatory bowl.
Simon was sitting on this toilet when the floor gave way. He and the crapper fell into the abyss so fast that his teeth bit his nose and he would have vanished altogether had the underside of the bowl not banged to a stop against the waste pipe and balanced there, beached, holed, the Titanic of Toilets, teetering over the centre of the earth. Simon hasn’t been able to go near the place since, except to ‘stand’. Wedging his head against the low, sloped ceiling of the stairs, clutching the washbasin with both hands, he teeters his toes to the edge of the broken woodwork – and waters the blackness.
When Simon wants ‘to sit’ he considers even my bathroom upstairs too close to the scene of trauma; he has to go to the farthest possible alternative accommodation in the house: the toilet on the top floor.
Returning to the Excavation. Now is the correct moment to slip on your steel boots, belt up with climbing robes and G-clips, grab a few plasters and a bottle of antiseptic: we’re about to enter the first cave.
It’s easier in here to describe where the paper, plastic bags and books are not than where they are: they’re not on the ceiling.
I suppose you could say, technically, there are no papers on the top third of the walls.
A lot of it trembles in towers on the arms of chairs, on tables, on cupboards, on top of a dinner lady’s trolley that Simon’s managed to wrench out of some local school and rattle back along the midnight streets.
There are outlines of walls, outcrops suggesting a clothes cupboard, a padded chair, one, two, possibly three chests of drawers; no discernible floor; and – watch out! – an I-beam thrusting across the ceiling, indicating that, at some point in this cave’s history, primitive inhabitants have knocked out a wall, possibly during the Cambridge population explosion of the early 1900s.
Finally, here is floor.
We can rest for a moment now and take our bearings. To the right, the front of the house: a bay window, light cut off by blinds (pattern of blinds: coloured, wave-like stripes, perhaps reminding cave inhabitants of the sea). To the left: dinge.
Patterns made in the shadows by the stalagmites of plastic bags and books include a galloping cow, a beetle trying to hide under what was once the padded armchair, the face of a grotesque man …
Gullies moulded into the floor surface of paper-filled supermarket bags, envelopes, squashed boxes, fallen books, mark the route Simon takes when he stomps from his mattress to the toilet under the stairs; the toilet to the kitchen; kitchen (carrying a plate of sardines) back to mattress; then (plate and cutlery bouncing as he leaps up) mattress to front patio door, where the paper disorder gives way and a solitary rut leads through the leaves and fallen shards of masonry big enough to kill, up to the street outside our house – at which point mechanised sweepers and dustbin men take over and the trail disappears.
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 written on exercise stationery, cut with strangling precision around the words and folded so that the creases form a tessellation of diamonds.
Venturing your hand in further 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 8 October 1969:
Dear Norton,
The