Simon Read online

Another error he has noticed in these sample pages: why do I say he smells of sardines in tomato sauce? They’re not sardines, they’re kippers. They may, on occasion, be mackerel. And in all cases he buys them in oil. He dislikes tomato sauce.

  “If I can’t say you smell of sardines in tomatoes,” I retort, “can I say you smell of fatty headless fish?”

  It’s essential to emphasize that in no sense of the term is Simon mad. He’s covered in facial hair and wears rotten shoes and trousers for the opposite reason: too much mental order. He burps; he makes elephant yawns without putting his hand over his mouth; he thinks you won’t mind knowing about the progress of his digestion; and he goes on long, sweaty walks, then doesn’t change his clothes for a week. But what else can he do? Everybody is messy somehow, and there’s no other place for Simon to store his quota. Inside his head there’s no room: all the mess has been swept out. It’s as pristine in there as a surgeon’s operating theater.

  Another word he doesn’t like in my manuscript is “stomps.”

  “What do you mean, I ‘stomp’? How do you know I ‘stomp’? I don’t believe you can hear me from upstairs. You’re not suggesting I ‘stomp’ on the ceiling, are you?”

  As for my description of his floor…“Oh dear,” he groans, conclusively.

  Suddenly, Simon loses interest. Although his face has no time for expressions, his legs and arms want to get on with it. He starts to wiggle his hands; his head begins to rotate; then, without explanation, he drops the thesaurus on his bedcover, bolts from the bed, dodging a wave of Asda bags (“Sainsbury’s, Alex. I find it enhances one’s appreciation of a book if the facts are correct”) and hurries to the kitchen, gripping his peck of peppered kippers. Through the connecting door, I watch his hair weave around the lightbulb like a gray feather-duster. A large, disjointed man, he can move with surprising litheness.

  People such as Simon—unknown, living people—don’t trust words. Words may be a familiar method of communication (although Simon generally prefers grunts or showing off bus tickets), but that doesn’t mean it’s respectable to make a living out of them, especially if you’re a sloppy scribbler with a light-hearted attitude to truth like me. Words are too nuanced and potentially destructive to be left in the hands of someone so unrigorous. A straightforward four-letter noun beginning with f—

  “No!”

  —defining your style of accommodation, and bang! The entire disciplinary force of Cambridge City Council rushes up the hill with clipboards to snap, tick and bylaw you into a magistrate’s court.

  For Simon, the world is a leaky place. You have constantly to be on your guard against the seeping away or sudden disappearance of comfort. He imagines that this book (“if it ever comes out”) will be “bedside reading” for housing inspectors. He thinks they might run him out of the city.

  If that’s what words can do when wrongly applied to a few cubic feet of basement air enclosed by bricks and bramble-bush-covered windows, what massacre will they perform on the central object of a full-length biography—which is a trillion misunderstandings-in-waiting—i.e., a living human being?

  Simon says he doesn’t stomp. I say he does. Simon says he should know, since a) he does the non-stomping and b) he’s closer to his feet than I am.

  “But if you are stomping on the ceiling, then my ears are closer,” I observe. “Biography—especially biography of an unknown person—is not and cannot be about reality.” I follow after him to the kitchen. “It’s no more about reality than, say, say…minus numbers. And just as the solution to the problem of the impossible existence of minus numbers is to realize that they are not real things at all, but something you’ve done to positive numbers, i.e., you’ve ‘minus-ed’ them—in short, minus numbers are verbs, not nouns—so in biography, it’s not the real subject, but the active, i.e., verbal, relationship between the biographer and subject that…”

  “Mathematicians do not think of negative numbers like that,” interrupts Simon, tugging at the mackerel tin, which has somehow got wedged in his pocket. “We think of them as real objects. Exactly as real as positive numbers.”

  “The reason that a biography of an unknown person cannot be about reality,” I continue regardless, “is because the reader will fall asleep. Reality is too bland. An ordinary person doesn’t have the dramatic and universally appreciated facts of the famous to rely on. They’ve only got the oddness and power of their character. So,” I say, expanding my chest with the sudden conviction that I am going to be able to complete these sentences neatly, “a biography of the unknown has to be a biographer’s effort to interpret facts, his impression of the facts—what has been done to the facts by his brain. It’s about one person’s mumbled attempts vaguely to interpret what they dimly think they might have seen on a misty day in another person’s possible behavior, but which they quite possibly haven’t; and any biographer who puts pen to paper claiming his motives are objectivity and truth is a fraud. Biography is not mathematics. It is not bus timetables. What matters is not whether or not you ‘stomp,’ in fact, since who can know that as a fact, but that I think you stomp, and by the way, aren’t you supposed to take the sweet corn out of the supermarket bag before you put the tin in boiling water?”

  Squeak of a tap; the cymbal clatter of high-pressure liquid on thin cooking steel; the castanets and maracas of bubbles; muffled turbulence as the pot fills.

  Simon’s wolfish. While we were trespassing through the rubbish in this basement, he’d been on a moonlit hike around the city distributing anti-car newsletters for an environmental campaign group called Transport 2000, and it’s emptied his belly. After buses and trains, the thing that matters most to him is his digestive tract.

  Small headless fish are his favorite food. Except when in Montreal, Simon boils his kippers in the tin, “to save on washing up.” Kippers come in a different-sized tin in Canada, and “I don’t want to take the chance of doing something wrong.” In Montreal he eats frozen fish in supermarket display packs—not because he prefers it but because the label tells him what to do, which is comforting, although he never grills, “because you can’t see what’s going on.”

  Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simon does not enjoy variety in food.

  “I like to find a formula that works and stick to it,” he insists, stepping out of the kitchen to make sure I understand. “I once found myself in possession of mackerel in curry sauce because I’d failed to look carefully enough when in the supermarket. I couldn’t finish it.

  “Yes, I am a worrier. My mother was a worrier.”

  Simon is incapable of frowning; his expressions are limited to petulance, grinning and vacuity. He adopts the last, and returns to the stove.

  Mackerel Norton, the dish he is preparing this evening, is his Number One meal. It comes in two forms: finger-scalding hot and body temperature. Tonight, he’s having it hot.

  Mackerel Norton

  for one

  1 tin of mackerel fillets, any sort, as long as not in tomato sauce.

  1 flavored Batchelors Chinese packet rice. (“I sometimes use ‘Golden Vegetable.’”)

  2 pans of boiling water.

  Put first two in the third. Bubble rice frothily for correct time. Release rice, spurt open mackerel, eat on bed with much hand waving and gulps of cool air.

  He would, if he could, eat Mackerel Norton seven days a week; but world events and the pressures of anti-car campaigning are such that he can barely manage to get it three days in a row. The rest of the time he gobbles two forms of takeaway (chicken biryani and chicken in black-bean sauce), chili-flavor crisps from Morrisons and Bombay mix, a spiced Indian snack.

  This evening Simon has accidentally picked up a different-flavor packet rice, and is alarmed. Cooking instructions are suspect to Simon. They are the route errors use when they want to sneak into your stomach. Why should one flavor respond to hot water in the same way as another? How can you be sure that one rice packet, representing the products of a country containing yellow people in
blue boilersuits, should be treated the same as another packet, from a country 16,000 miles distant from the first, with brown people and cactuses? Cooking instructions have no appreciation of the slyness of variables.

  “Uugggh, do Mexican vegetables boil in the same way as Chinese?” Simon asks, waving the packet at me through the kitchen doorway.

  In Simon’s kitchen there are no cobwebs. An aerosol of grease has killed them off. If you stand on a footstool, it is possible to find—original inhabitants, from before the Extinction Event (Simon’s purchase of the house in 1981)—dead spiders inhumed above the wall cupboards, in the Cretaceous layers of fat.

  There is evidence of urgent eating everywhere. The oil slicks on the melamine surfaces; eyebrow hairs embedded around the sink; foot and shoe grime that has gathered on the plastic embossed-tile flooring, making it look almost as though there is a rug on top; the curtains of grease moving down the sides of the sink like textured glass.

  Simon is not unhealthy. The principal source of serious infection in any house—the water supply—is cleaner here than in most places, because the attic in which the water head is stored is used as a room for tenants, and is therefore easily accessible and frequently checked. I can vouch for the fact that there are no mice floating in it, or spiders, woodlice, bloated and putrefying snails, or dead rats, as there certainly will be in the water tanks belonging to some of the people reading this sentence.

  He is not unhygienic, except in the eyes of today’s dainty obsessives and kitchen-product advertisers. He has a bath once a week and cleans his teeth daily. But he is not frightened of his digestion. Simon’s connection with decomposing food begins and ends, openly and honestly, as it does with all animals at ease: with a squelchy chew at one end and a sigh of release at the other.

  In a tidy kitchen, every knife, plate, whisk, frying pan, coffee mug, ladle, tea strainer, and chopping board and all machines are stagnant with cleanliness, with the exception of the dishwasher murmuring disinfectant-speak under the sink. The object of the tidy and twee housekeeper is to remove all proof that he is a functioning organism.

  In Simon’s kitchen, Hunger has slobbered everywhere.

  Yellow smears splashed along the left-hand worktop are from cartons of chicken biryani, the lids ripped off; the drips of purple, slightly granulated, are Ferns’ brinjal pickle; the intermingled slops of ochre green, Mr. Patak’s mixed pickle.

  “And what’s wrong with Mr. Fern’s mixed pickle?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tried it. Do they do one?”

  Both types of stain are the result of scraping contents from jars with a plastic spoon that is too short, and rushing the findings back on a bombing run across the sideboards to the now dead chicken. By the sink, chicken in black-bean sauce has added a brown tinge.

  This rancid atmosphere and the cold, soporific mood of the main rooms, together with the almost undetectable whiff of furniture polish from the paintings and mahogany items that Simon inherited following the death of his father— a homeopathic dose of plushness—combine to give the Excavation a pleasant smell. Warmed up, with perhaps a squeeze of lemon and lime shaving cream thrown in to suggest Life, it might even be cozy.

  All the same, it’s easy to get carried away by this bomb site. Simon isn’t universally messy, even outside his head. He’s as fussy as a surgeon when it comes to planning a journey. He manages two homes (he has a flat in London), has a turnover of satisfied tenants, and is never behind with bills, legal documents or financial dealings with his accountant. None of these is true of me. In addition, his transport newsletter comes out once every three or four months; is twelve to sixteen pages long; single-spaced; eight-point type; covers hundreds if not thousands of unfailingly accurate details about new routes, closures and timetables; and keeps careful account of all local outrages by the government Highways Agency. When Simon wants there to be order, he’s unmatchable. When not, a colostomy bag is not more disgusting. Simon insists that this basement is his catalogue: all it needs is pruning, sorting out, filing, and it will be an invaluable library of documentation.

  A list, from 1992, of a few of the bus and train journeys Simon made that year. He has a pile of such lists, over a foot high.

  “A documentation of what, exactly?” I ask while he sits down to his supper.

  “Where I’ve been?” he suggests.

  I call it his middenheap. These papers are just bones: all that is left after Simon’s banquet on their information relating to buses and trains: the public-transport detritus of a monstrous feast on facts that began when he was three.

  “How about if I take the focus of the story off the floor and into the air?” I suggest breezily, returning to the battle. “‘One of the greatest mathematical geniuses of the twentieth century lives beneath my floorboards,’ I could begin, ‘in the dank, fetid gloom of his subterranean…’”

  “No.”

  “Not dank?”

  “No.”

  “Or fetid?”

  He shakes his head.

  “How about miasmic? I quite like miasmic. It sounds poetic.”

  Also no good: “Ungh-ungh.”

  I take a deep breath, slowly let out air and reach across for Simon’s thesaurus. “Ponging?”

  6 The Monster

  That’s the name of Simon’s special area in mathematics, because of its gargantuan complexity and fiery insight into the fundamental structure of our universe.

  No one knows what the Monster looks like. It can be detected only through its mathematical traces. Like shadows and ghosts, it inhabits a penumbral landscape between abstraction and solidity.

  The Monster belongs to an area of mathematics known as Group Theory, or the study of symmetry.

  Groups are represented in textbooks by tiresome grids of numbers similar to sudoku tables, yet they are among the most startling investigative tools in human thought. Quantum Theory, Relativity Theory, predictions about the number and types of sub-atomic particles, the codes used to scramble military and financial information—all of it fundamentally reliant on the study of Groups. They have even been used to investigate incest among Aboriginal tribes.

  A sudoku table has nine rows and nine columns of numbers.

  The Monster has 80801​74247945128​7588645​9904961​7107570057​5436800​0000000.

  *7

  (Heavy mathematical chapters in this book are quarantined by a *)

  Introducing

  To understand Simon’s particular genius—how it developed and why for a few years he led the braying pack of mathematicians hunting down the Monster—the reader needs to know about squares.

  On the face of it, the study of symmetries is a subject for children. A square has symmetry: you can rotate it, and the result looks just as if you’d done nothing at all:

  The same goes for an equal-sided triangle:

  A circle, cube, sphere and a host of other shapes with names like dodecadodecahedron (twenty-four faces) and icosidodecadodecahedron (forty-four faces) each have similar symmetrical properties.

  In order to develop mathematics out of such simple stuff, we have to keep a diary of these symmetries.

  For example, to keep track of these four moves, we can represent them like this:

  Note that there’s a sense of self-containment about this set of operations. A square has four sides and therefore only four distinct ways of rotating. After that, you’ve exhausted all the possibilities. No amount of rotating will paint it green or puff it up to twice its original size. Other operations are needed to perform that sort of thing.

  If we rotate a square in any of the above four ways, it still looks to the outsider just like the square we started with:

  But, privately, we know we’ve been fiddling. For example, if we rotate a square through two turns (i.e., flip it head over heels), we can represent this:

  In other words,

  signifies the act of swiveling a square through two 90-degree turns, without anybody noticing.

  Natu
rally, if you turn a square by one turn through 90 degrees, then do it again, that’s the equivalent of two 90-degree turns overall:

  1 + 1 = 2

  Similarly, rotate a square once, followed by two more turns, and the result is equivalent to three turns. You’ve almost gone the whole way round:

  1 + 2 = 3

  And so on. Rotate a square by two turns, then do nothing, go off and play with somebody else’s crayons, and no one’s going to be fooled—it’s still just two turns:

  2 + 0 = 2

  A square looks just the same after any combination of these operations, or all of them:

  The figures with arms and legs are simply diary entries to keep track of the secret things we’ve been doing to the square in the playpen.

  What happens if we turn a square, say, five times? That’s the equivalent of spinning it through a full cycle, then throwing in an extra single turn for good measure:

  Group Theory isn’t interested in recording such clever-clogs stuff. Turn a square round five times and you might as well just have turned it once. It’s the final outcome only that matters, so it’s put down as an ordinary single turn:

  So, although it seems possible that:

  3 + 2 = 5

  because the first four turns make a complete rotation, head over heels, back exactly to where we started, we ignore them as wasted effort, and just focus on the one leftover turn, which got us somewhere:

  3 + 2 = 1

  In this respect, rotating a square is the same as rotating the hour hand on an ordinary clockface. If it’s two o’clock and we add twelve hours, we don’t say it’s fourteen o’clock (unless we’re being tiresome). We say it’s two o’clock again.