Читать книгу The Genius in my Basement - Alexander Masters, Alexander Masters - Страница 8

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26th November 1922: Carter pierced a small hole in the wall through which he could look into the Pharaoh’s chamber with a sliver of torch light. Asked if he could see anything he replied, ‘yes, wonderful things!’

Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb

But I can’t find the light switch.

Which is important when you’re standing at the top of Simon’s stairs with nothing but sardine stench and book-writer’s bones to break your fall. Every other house in our terrace has a light switch by the stairwell door – why has Simon wrenched his out?

It makes me tense. My nerves clench into a knot. It feels planned.

There are holes in the stair carpet: lips of fabric at the edge of the treads, cut to flop forward, snatch … tap-tap … your toes …

… and plunge you onto the quarry tiles at the bottom.

These stairs are booby-trapped – against biographers.

Phhuuuuh! What was that? A moth? No. Just a grease dollop drifting by. Unidentified species often float up this stairwell.

It’s safest to take the rest of the steps spreadeagle fashion, one foot slithering against the wall while the other rat-a-tats along the bannister spindles. The palms of my hands catch and release on splodges of stickiness. As I slide down, I pass over two treads that have been blasted away. The wood has been broken in. It’s a sheer drop between the thigh-shredding splinters left behind to the floor below. Craftily, Simon has left the carpet in place over the chasm.

The only person who has been caught by this booby trap is the booby who manufactured it in the first place, Dr Simon MINUS Norton. The other week, I remember, I saw him leaping about the street on one leg, clutching his knee.

At last, here, at the bottom of the steps, we encounter a switch …

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: 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 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, 3cm x 3cm x 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 mould 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 per cent 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 centre shaded and full stops 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-coloured 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 window pane, rattle yellowfly off the buddleia branches, and are beaten senseless against the coalshed 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 potplant, now dead, its leaves the colour of pie crust, and a snapshot of two children carrying a warthog. On one side of this room is a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on which everything is stored in marvellous 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 odour of sardines coming over my right shoulder.

Someone is standing behind me.