“Thank you, Simon.”
Then you attempt to pick up the pieces of the shattered conversation.
It’s important to realize that this fifth type of grunt never comes about because Simon isn’t able to keep up with the discussion, or because his brain has short-circuited and popped out the non sequitur in a fizz of misfired neurons. They appear for the opposite reason: he has dashed too far ahead, gone off on a side path, left the ponderous, sequential-talking rest of us behind, raced up into the hills of puns and synonyms and humorous, leapingly interconnected memories…then jumped back with the result, waving his arms and grinning in triumph, like a child ambushing us from behind a tree.
As the fact dawns on Simon that no one has the foggiest idea what he’s talking about, he is not resentful. Politely, he allows the intensity of his grin to slip away. Measuredly, he rejoins the conversation.
(1) Happy, (2) puzzled, (3) incomprehensible, (4) frustrated, (5) phrasal (“Thank you, Simons”). Sometimes, Simon will go for weeks without offering anything to his biographer but one of these five grunts.
And then, PING!
An email comes.
And behind the grunts, a man.
Monday, February 8th, 9.19pm
I’m sorry, I can’t make head or tail of the last chapter you sent me. I think that any reader who shares my way of thinking will be completely bewildered.
Tuesday, February 9th, 1.17am
I can’t follow the thread of your writing. If I were someone I didn’t know rather than myself, I suspect that in reading it I would have problems following the story even if I could understand the sentences. Incidentally, this is not something I’d say with your previous book. There I could understand your description of Stuart, my problem was you gave me no motivation to understand his character.
Wednesday, February 10th, 12.32am
I’m not sure what you mean [in Chapter 10] by my “jocular” attitude to mathematics, but never mind. You’ve got the calculations wrong—28 is 256, not 4096, which is 212, and the others are similarly shifted. I don’t understand your bit about numbers floating in the sky. No, I haven’t a clue whether it was a right or left leg that the duck was missing.
[This is followed by fifty-two lines explaining the story of the legless duck, which also includes a self-playing piano, an inferno in the Channel Tunnel, admission that he reads a magazine called Cruising Monthly, and a threat of imprisonment by gas inspectors.]
Wednesday, February 10th, 12.48am
I know what the word “jocular” means. What I don’t know is what you mean when you describe my love of mathematics as jocular. I might be jocular, but how can my love of mathematics be? I don’t know what you mean by a “Rabelaisian” series (and don’t say “in the style of Rabelais”!). However, unlike you I do know how to spell the word.
eSimon, the Simon who logs on to his computer at one in the morning, is a different man from Simon the grunter: eloquent, fluent, conversational, reflective, poignant, sometimes funny and—if the subject matter has anything to do with my attempts to understand genius, popularize mathematics or write biography—acerbic.
* * *
Simon’s interview with Kevin, resident of Cambourne, in 2016
(An example of Simon’s clear, fluent, amusing writing style. Abridged from an editorial [2006] in his Public Transport Newsletter, which he writes and publishes three or four times a year.)
Q: What decided you to move to Cambourne (a village outside Cambridge)?
A: We chose Cambourne because there was a direct bus link to my job in Papworth, and we could also get buses to St. Neots for trains to London. It also seemed a good place for my wife’s aging parents. And we hoped our house would be a good investment—its value would have gone up had the east–west rail link been built close to the A428, as recommended by the London–South Midlands Multi-Modal Study.
Q: But I gather things then went sour.
A: Yes. In 2005 the bus links to Papworth and St. Neots were reduced, and I found I had to cycle in most days. The main road was very unpleasant, and the side route via Elsworth took twice as long. Then in 2006 came the Council’s budget cuts to buses. In 2007 the A428 dual carriageway opened, our road became an “overspill A14,” and Madingley Road became clogged, making our buses increasingly erratic.
Q: But things are better now, aren’t they?
A: Yes, in one sense. The big stores left the city center because they realized people didn’t want to have to put up with gridlock every time they went shopping. But there’s the downside that it’s now much harder to get to the shops by public transport. Nor could we use Internet shopping as there was rarely anyone in the house to accept deliveries, apart from my mother-in-law, who was often asleep, and even when she was awake she could never get to the door on time.
Q: How has your family been coping?
A: My father-in-law died in the bird-flu epidemic. My mother-in-law has become increasingly frail. Visiting the children in Oxford and London is a problem—the bus to Oxford has been taking ever longer because of growing congestion, and it’s a long walk from the city center to the rail station. For a time we tried the coach, but then they moved the coach terminal to the rail station too…
Q: Have you ever thought of buying a car?
A: Yes, often. But then we’d ask, how could we face our children knowing we’d helped to ruin the world for them? Our generation has badly betrayed our children’s.
Q: I gather you’re leaving Cambourne soon?
A: Yes, we’ll move to London or Oxford as soon as we’ve settled on a place for my mother-in-law. Good riddance—to the Cambridge area I mean, of course!
See www.cambsbettertransport.org.uk/newsletter93.html for the full version.
* * *
10 Mars
People do sometimes tell me how nice I am looking (e.g., at my mother’s funeral) when I wear new clothes, but it always makes me feel very embarrassed. I say, “I don’t want to know that.” I don’t want to be thought of as someone for whom personal appearance is important.
Simon
“I’m going to see a Martian. He aaah, hnnn…it lives in Woking.”
Simon blocked my sun, his duffel swinging slowly to a stop after his unexpected rush off the pavement at my café table.
“Hnnn, aaah, uugh. As I say, my grandmother lived where the Martian is. Hnnnh. Would you like to come too?” Spring on earth! Simon giving me encouragement!
I jumped up, swigged back my coffee and gathered my books and notes. A ballyhoo of cherry blossom leapt about the wall of Darwin College Fellows’ Garden. Dead-looking trees creaked out of the sodden grass, sprouted buds and crackled quickly into the sky.
I’d been working on a cartoon about the origin of numbers.
In the late 1970s a young French woman called Denise Schmandt-Besserat made an astonishing discovery. Forgotten in the storeroom of the Fogg Museum of art in Harvard
was a prehistoric clay purse
from the ancient city of Nuzi,
in the country now called
Iraq.
“Uuuugh, aah, errr…oh dear!” Simon blustered. “What is the point of this? I don’t understand pictures.”
“It’s the origin of your subject. The purse had an inscription on it that said it was the property of Ziqarru, a shepherd, and contained forty-nine ‘counters representing small cattle.’ Not that that impressed the Harvard excavators any more than it does you. They broke the seal, found the forty-nine clay pebbles inside, as promised—and lost them.”
“Oh dear.”
“Exactly. But this French scholar realized that Ziqarru’s egg-shaped purse was a simple accounting device, from the dawn of writing. People had discovered other egg-shaped purses containing counters before, but none with symbols on the outside like this. It was the earliest known attempt to symbolize the contents of the purse with abstract marks. According to her, it was the need, by palace accountants, to keep track of animal numbers that led to the invention of
writing and mathematics. If someone who understood the new marks thought Ziqarru had been stealing animals, all they had to do was check the writing on the outside. And if Ziqarru suspected that person of using the newfangled cuneiform to cheat him, he could break open the purse and prove he was innocent by counting the flock off against the pebbles inside. Lo! Symbolic writing had begun. Next thing you know, it’s algebra, calculus and Shakespeare. Writing comes from mathematics, in short, and it all comes from accountancy.”
“Oh DEAR!”
“Why ‘Oh dear!’ this time?”
“No reason,” Simon said, sighed morosely and unbent his elbow.
The handles of his duffel rippled down the forearm of his puffa jacket and the bag dropped to the pavement.
“Excuse me!” he gnashed. “I’d like to sit down. Can you remove all this paper?” As he hit the seat he jolted into a better temper.
Simon’s most famous ancestor was the Prophet Abraham, of Ur of the Chaldees. Then came Joseph, of the Coat of Many Colors. His son was Manasseh, first mentioned in Genesis, who led one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Next follows 3,000 years of forgetfulness before the family pops back into life on a rolled-up poster in the back room of Simon’s Excavation—two shelves along and one up from the television-that-might-have- broken-twenty-years-ago-but-possibly-it’s-only-a-fuse:
ASLAN MANASSEH
b. Bombay 1884
m
KITTY MEYER
b. Calcutta 1891
The Manassehs are the leading family of the oldest settled community of people in recorded history: the Iraqi Jews of Babylon, 150 miles from Nuzi and Ziqarru’s purse.
Congratulating myself on my willingness to be at the coalface of biographical reportage and, at a moment’s notice, drop everything and go to Woking, I walked with Simon from the café, across the park. “The Martian” turned out to be a statue in honor of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. According to a tourist leaflet Simon eventually discovered in his coat pocket, it’s seven meters high. It looks like a beetle trying to curtsy with its legs stuck in vacuum tubes. There’s also a Woking Spaceship embedded in the pavement nearby, and Woking Bacteria, made out of splodges of colored concrete brick.
Battling a wallet from his trouser pocket, in the center of Cambridge Simon boarded a bus to the railway station. He muttered out coins into the driver’s cash tray, seized the ticket, held it to the light to investigate it with narrowed eyes, then made for a free space at the back of the bus, bouncing his duffel from ear to ear of the seated passengers. Blank-eyed, belly exposed, his ski jacket rucked halfway up to his chest, Simon threw himself at the seat with a self-congratulatory sigh and let his face settle around his grin.
The face of the woman in front was soured by watchfulness. Simon, though sexless as a nematode, is the fantasy image of a kiddy-fiddler, and this Bruiser Mum had spent her morning proudly dressing up her six-year-old daughter in lash-thickening mascara, gloss lipstick, Primark miniskirt and pink heels.
Standing beside Simon, I took out a notebook, and consulted a list of urgent biographical questions. It is important, with Simon, to select not just the correct wording for a query—one that doesn’t contain any banned nouns or adjectives, or lead to outbursts of correction because of a tiny factual error—but also the right context. PHILOSOPHICAL questions are best on a Tuesday night. This is because he has returned from his weekend jaunt to Scarborough, via Glasgow, the Isle of Man and Pratt’s Bottom, finished his week’s backlog of 347 emails: he is feeling expansive and post-prandial. Questions requiring REMINISCENCE can be extended as far as Thursday, or broached on country walks through Iron Age hill forts—there is nothing quite like 2,000-year-old battlements, where the clash of Roman legion against shrieking Celt still trembles in the air, to get Simon going on the subject of Ashdown, his junior school.
Bus trips to the train station are strictly for the exchange of FACTS.
The scholar of Simon Norton Studies must proceed with delicacy.
“I wanted to ask about your grandfather, Aslan,” I began. “He was a businessman, wasn’t he?”
“If you say so.”
“What did he sell?”
“I don’t know.”
“According to your brothers it was textiles, but what…”
“Yesterday I was in Blickling.” Simon pinched his fingers into his wallet and extracted a worm of paper. “Here’s the ticket.”
“Simon, your grandfather. Was it jute?”
He waggled the ticket higher in the air, closer to my face. Four inches long, it had arrowhead shapes cut out at either end, and purple 1970s techno-writing along the length repeating with great mechanical urgency, top and bottom, that it was 1:23 p.m. in King’s Lynn, and that Sheldrake Travel was “very happy to have you aboard.”
(“I do not think that could have been the ticket I showed you. There is no direct bus from King’s Lynn to Blickling. But if you prefer to get things wrong deliberately, you belong on the team of a trash publication like the National Enquirer.”)
“Is there anything special about it?” I asked, too self-conscious to hold the snippet of paper up to the light and try out his squinting trick, without at least some guarantee of reward.
Simon considered for a moment, then shook his head contentedly. “No.”
“I was in Blickling last week too,” said a fellow sitting beside Simon. The man was resting his chin on his hands, which were in turn piled on the handle of his walking cane; he bounced his head gently. “Lovely hall, and, aaah, the lake. I got there very early and the mist, it was…”
“Did you go on any buses?” Simon blurted.
“To the hall,” agreed the man, nodding some more, rather slowly, as if tapping the sharpness out of the interruption.
“From?” shot Simon.
“Norwich, I believe it…”
“The number X5,” Simon declared, and directed a smile of triumph around the bus.
The elderly man was not to be put off: he was a trouper for the cause of discursive memoir. “I think my favorite—I mean, lakes are always lovely, but lakes are lakes, I always say—my favorite was the Chinese Room. Did you see that? That flock wallpaper, it was flock, wasn’t it, and that pagoda in the glass cage…?”
“Any other buses?”
“Well, after lunch, we went to Cromer, and had the most delicious brown crab…”
“The X5 again. Unless you went on a Sunday?”
“No, let’s see, Tuesday, that’s it, because then at Wells-Next-the-Sea, the sunlight on the water was sparkling in just…”
“Uggh, ah…” Simon pulled out a dog-eared timetable from his bag and searched the pages. “Let’s see, aah…the 73.” Spotting that Nodding Man still had a bit of life in him, Simon brought in the heavy artillery, lifted out a second book, which seemed to be compressed from the scrag ends of newspaper, ran his fingers down the index and began darting back and forth between two sections at once. “But you could have taken the 645 and changed at…let’s see, aaah…or, uuugh, aaaghhh, if you’d wanted to go on the steam railway…
(“Alex! What are you saying? Number 73? Number 645? A steam train? I am sure you have invented these references also. I could not have said them. Do you want me to be seen as an ignoramus on public transport?”)
“…which calls at hnnnn…King’s Lynn, and…”
It began to rain. First, a barely visible drizzle, picked out only against certain backgrounds—the black reflections in the windows of the Cambridge Hotel; a middle-distance blurriness when the bus stopped at the crossroads by the Catholic church, and we had a view up to the park. But it might have been nothing more than stripes of movement left in my eyes by the Clint Eastwood action smack-’em-blast-’em-ride-off-into-them-thar-cactus-lands flick I’d watched last night. Next, streaks of water on the window. Finally, drops pounding the metal sill by Simon’s elbow in buttercup explosions.
“Getting back to your grandfather, Aslan…”
The driver slammed the br
akes and swerved to avoid a line of Japanese girls who’d abruptly pedaled across the road in front. The bus was filled with sudden pushes and violent attempts to avoid falling over. I crashed forward down the aisle and fell sideways onto the six-year-old nympho.
“Oi, watch where you’re fucking going,” growled Bruiser Mum.
Simon, who spends much of his time smiling, smiled wider. He burrowed into his bag and, after much rustling and what looked like punches delivered at the fabric from the inside, re-emerged holding a carton of passionfruit juice, which he upended over his mouth.
At the end of the nineteenth century there were 50,000 Jews—a quarter of the city’s population—living peaceably alongside Arabs in Baghdad. Today, according to the latest Web report, there are four—four in the entire city. The pro-Hitler Iraqi government expelled and murdered them in pogroms before and during the Second World War. In the late 1940s underground movements smuggled them to safety at the rate of 1,000 a month. In 1951, Israel airlifted 60,000 more from the whole of Iraq and, with the perversity of the self-justified, bombed the rest to try to persuade them to follow. There are today more ostriches in Baghdad than there are Jews.
On one edge of the genealogical poster I’d excavated in the basement is a dedicatory note about Simon’s family:
All probabilities and evidence go to suggest that this community is descended from the ancient Jewish communities settled in Mesopotamia since the days of the Babylonian Captivity, 2,600 years ago…The purpose, in compiling the genealogical table, is to preserve, in some way, a record of a section of this community.
Simon Page 5
