The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters

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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 holdall, breaks away from two Marks and Spencer’s bags oozing over his feet and barges towards 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 holdall on first, reverse his bottom into position, take a breath and make a leap backwards 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 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 СКАЧАТЬ