The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters

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      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 refuses to let me use:

      ‘S—’ (seven letters, including a ‘q’.)

      ‘Too scandalous!’

      ‘P—’ (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: СКАЧАТЬ