Simon says that in his case, it was grief.
“Grief!” I marvel again. I feel almost betrayed. He has misled me. Hasn’t he known for months that I’ve been intending to subtitle this book “The Biography of a Happy Man”? What does he mean, grief?
Simon stares around the room of debris and timetables, and his shoulders collapse; there are many miles to go before it is clean.
For a moment my mind is also oppressed. Ask Simon about his past, his family, his plans for the future, his reaction to the fact that his neighbor has just drowned under a canal boat and been brought back to life—and he burps, makes elephant yawns without putting his hand over his mouth, dashes out of the house on long, sweaty journeys to God’s Blessing Green in Dorset. The only things about which he’s at all interested in emitting something other than one of his five grunts are these timetables. And look at the state of them!
Once upon a time Simon must have been tidy and concerned. In the back room, one wall is lined by a floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcase on which everything is arranged with startling care: pamphlets, timetables, catalogues, manuals, guidebooks, route maps, almanacs, directories—where big enough, they’re set upright alongside his murder mysteries and chess books; otherwise, they’re lined along the bottom two shelves in color-coded boxes. Old train tickets (in green boxes) from the 1960s, his student campaign letters (yellow) from the 1970s onward, begging local politicians to improve public-transport provision.
But after 1985, shelves still only four-fifths full, the filing takes to the floor: a deluge of paper and books. And there is another difference: the catalogues on the shelves are all the same design, tend to be printed by one or two central-government bodies and are thicker than the booklets on the carpet. The floor slosh is still sour-milk-colored but glossier, issued by dozens of private companies, referencing hundreds of different regions of the country. After 1985—the time when some mathematicians claim he suffered his “catastrophic intellectual collapse”—Simon has taken to collecting thousands of timetable publications, compared to the one or two simple doorstops of before. What happened to him after 1985?
“Simon, will you please answer me?” I return to the fray. “What is this about grief causing you to lose focus on mathematics? Grief about what exactly?”
He sighs. I sigh. He grunts a Grunt Number Four.
“Aaaaaahh, hunnh, ugggh…The 1985 Deregulation of the Buses Act.”
“Hello, my name’s Duncan, I’m gay.”
Simon has called a builder, or (since Simon has no more idea how to contact a builder than he does how to fry an onion) he’s kept an eye out in case one happens to stumble out of the bushes—and one has. Duncan stands outside the front door, holding the bottom of his face in the cup of his hand as if the putty won’t set.
On the street, I can see a bicycle with a homemade carriage attached to the back by an iron bar. “Duncan McRifkin’s Mobile Building and Decorating…” The words, on a metal panel, arch across a bumpy tarpaulin in cowboy serif, black against a shadow of green. A second row of letters, made up of one word only, stretches out thin and alone: “Service.” Its curved opening S and closing e puff out at each end of the sign like bloated cheeks.
“The solution to all your troubles is on there,” says Duncan, releasing his hand just long enough to point at the bike, then snatching it back.
He’s come to pull the Titanic Toilet out of the floor. He’s also going to repair the bean-sized holes in my bathtub, put treads on the booby-trap stairs and install a new shower upstairs. “This is a pipe bender,” he says, lugging a large tripod through the door. “Did I tell you? I’m gay.”
“What’s that scar?” I point at a rip on his neck that looks as if someone had chopped his head off, then stuck it back on without wiping away the excess glue.
“From when I tried to hang myself.” He puts a pipe in the bender and gives it a thwack with a wrench to show me how it works.
To kill himself, Duncan had gone into the attic of a friend’s house with a rope round his neck, tied the other end to a radiator, then flung himself out of the skylight window. But halfway down, it was the rope and not his neck that snapped.
“So I went back upstairs and tried again.”
This time, Duncan doubled up the rope.
His luck didn’t improve: again, the rope broke and he crashed into the flowerbed, his neck still whole.
Not a man to accept his incompetence hastily, Duncan went upstairs once more and hurled himself into the air for a third go. This time, however, he caught his thumb on the edge of the kitchen window, and split it open.
“Ah,” he thought, picking himself up from his friend’s now ruined flowerbed, “this gives me something to do.” Off he went to Addenbrooke’s Hospital to get his thumb patched up. It was the nurse who pointed out the splendid Chinese burn under his chin and the fact that his Pringle sweater was drenched in blood.
“I was in Fulbourn Mental Hospital for six months after that. Have I mentioned that I’m gay?”
Duncan likes to take a nap in his underpants after lunch. One day, about a week after he’d refloated the Titanic Toilet, and was about to have his siesta upstairs among the mangled shower pipes, I overheard Simon talking to him.
“Ahhhh, hhhnn, no, Duncan, I’m not gay. But I think if I was interested in sex, it would be with females.”
*27 Garbage Bag Group
I’ve noticed before that you like to wallow in filth.
Simon, to the author
As soon as the word “always” is mentioned, in any context whatsoever, in rush the mathematicians shouting about symmetry. Here’s a slightly different application of “always”:
When Simon’s cleaning up his floor, and throws out an envelope , a duplicate 1970s train ticket
and an Indian takeaway leaflet , it doesn’t matter in what order they end up inside the rubbish sack. It’s all garbage. It’s always the same to him how they manage themselves in there, just as long as they’re removed from the floor, out of sight and off to the county incinerator.
This selection of three objects in a rubbish bag must, in some way, have “symmetry.” Once Simon has put the items inside, no matter if he shakes the bag, it’s always three objects inside a sack. It’s the equivalent of the fact that no matter how much you rotate Triangle or Square through their symmetry turns, they always look the same. Shaking the bag changes the order, not the contents. The order of the items is, for garbage, the equivalent of rotation for squares and triangles.
Let’s say Simon leaves the room to go on a jaunt to Spital-in-the-Street, Lincolnshire. I sneak downstairs, pick out the garbage bag in question, and furiously kick the thing around the Excavation.
Beating up this bag is going to change the order of the contents. They might originally have been in this arrangement:
But after a good thwack with my foot, they have ended up in this one:
The envelope and the train ticket have changed position. In other words, I’ve delivered a particular kick
that has interchanged whatever was in position 1 in the bag with whatever was in position 2. I’ve “rotated” the order:
If I gave the bag exactly the same kick again, the objects in positions 1 and 2 would be swapped back, and return to their original position, i.e., the result is bugger-all. It’s the garbage-kicking equivalent of for rotating a square or for an equal-sided triangle:
Alternatively, I could have used a different kick the second time round—say,
which interchanges whatever is in position 2 with whatever is in position 3. So:
In short, followed by has, overall, produced a proper jumble, in which everything has ended up in a different place. The envelope that used to be by the neck of the bag, in position 1, has been beaten to the other end; the Indian takeaway leaflet has moved left, up to the middle; the bus ticket has gone from the middle to the neck. This is a truly sassy kick, and needs to be represented by a special shoe:
So the types of kicks we’ve
had so far are:
All told, there are six different ways three pieces of rubbish can be lined up inside a garbage bag—and therefore six different types of kick needed to get them into all the possibilities. Once you’ve got them all sorted out,1 you can draw up a big Group Table again to keep track of how these kicks combine, just as with the regular triangle and the square:
The Garbage Kicking Group
And here’s the essential point—the reason for my obsession with kicking Simon’s garbage. This Group Table represents exactly the same Group as the one for the rotations and flippings of Triangle in Chapter 13. All that’s different is the notation.
But replace each of these symbols…
by these…
…respectively, and you’ll find the two tables are identical. You might never have imagined that the rotations-and-flips-of-a-triangle and kicking-a-bag-of-rubbish-around-Simon’s-Excavation had anything in common, but they are examples of exactly the same thing. They are just two of the day-to-day, commonplace manifestations of a particular type of symmetry. As with all symmetries, this one is embedded deep in the metaphysics of the universe. Like a mischievous Hindu god, it pops up to our world whenever the fancy takes it, in any one of a billion different disguises.
Group Theory is at last starting to show its power. It peeks under the surface of existence. It gathers our world into orderliness.
That’s enough about garbage.
Next chapter, please.
* * *
1 The other two are:
28
You must be very careful not to jump to easy answers with Simon. That is a danger. I think the subject of your last book told you that too.
Professor Conway, to the author
Simon appeared beside me suddenly and silently (as happens much too often for such a clumsy man). After a moment of fishy gasping, he dropped his bag onto the bus terminus pavement.
“Hullo.”
“Hello.”
“Hallo.”
“Hello.”
“Hnnnn.”
Introductions now probably over, Simon wrenched at the buttons on his puffa jacket and tipped himself forward to squint at the seventy-two-point headline of the timetable. He was taking me to the AGM of the Sudbury–Haverhill Railway Action Committee. “Haverhill, Haverhill,” he muttered, and glowed with purposefulness and anticipation.
On the other side of the noticeboard a double-decker rumbled gently. Above the driver’s window, written in LEDs, close to a foot high, was “44: Haverhill.”
The driver caught my eye. I nodded back. I raised my eyebrows in companionship.
“Simon, he wants to go.”
“Hnnnnn, aaagh…” said Simon.
I shuddered and stamped my feet. An arctic wind sliced up Emmanuel Street and buffeted the departure screens.
“Simon, if we don’t get on now, he’ll leave.”
“Hnnnn,” said Simon, and opened the zip of his duffel. For a few seconds he appeared to be assaulting the bag, battering it from inside; then he stood up, triumphant, gripping a folded leaflet: a Cambridge–Haverhill bus timetable, scruffy, out-of-date. Simon shook it at our bus.
The driver slapped his hands back to the wheel, jabbed the ignition and rumbled off between the empty buses on either side. Into the hollow rushed the wind, picking out each crack in my overcoat.
“Hnnn,” repeated Simon, gazing with satisfaction after our vanished transport. “Next one in twenty minutes.”
He dropped the folded leaflet back into his bag, and bent back to the station timetable, running his fingers across a line of numbers, stroking their heads.
Simon’s lived in this city for thirty years, but he still likes to confirm his exits and entrances.
On the next bus, the first thing he did was get out his map of Cambridge, open it up with a strenuous shake that biffed me on the ear, and place his forefinger at the center. As the bus moved off—left, along Parker’s Piece—right, past the swimming pool—left, at the Catholic church—Simon’s fingertip twisted and turned with it.
“But I still don’t understand, Simon, why are we taking this service and not the previous one?”
“Excuse me, don’t talk to me now, please. I am rather busy.”
Past Addenbrooke’s Hospital, glowing with streetlamps and bulbs to warn airplanes away from the incineration tower, up the Gog Magog hills, above the city’s sparkling lights.
“This service is the Number 13,” said Simon, tugging a catalogue out of his pocket. He flicked through the pages, tapped a couple of numbers on the nose, and squeezed the book back into his puffa jacket. “The other was the Number 44. This service,” he repeated with greedy satisfaction, “takes longer.”
On the other side of the Gogs, we plunged among the hollows, into where night had built up a forest across the road.
On the upstairs front seat of a double-decker, there’s nothing to stop a man from exploding through the windshield when the driver brakes, so Simon never sits in the front seat. He places his bag on the front seat, himself in the row behind, then grips any rail he can reach like a fairground rider. Even on Conwy Bus Route Number 256 he wouldn’t be so giddy as to try to get a good view of what’s going on by sitting with his face against the glass. The 256 runs up the shoulder of Mount Snowdon, surges over the Aberglaslyn Pass, and idles down through forests and lakes to a flickering Irish Sea—Simon’s favorite route “in terms of visual satisfaction.”1
At Linton, the bus stopped for a few minutes beside a humpbacked bridge before entering the danger zone of village backroads. It crouched massively under the streetlight, grumbling and shaking. The town was quiet and ready for midnight, although it was barely past 7 p.m. A woman clickety-clocked out of an alley, scuttled across the cobbles, disappeared into another alley. The bus took in a breath of air, stiffening itself for the lanes ahead. Simon finished his carton of passionfruit juice, a thin trickle of yellow dribbling down his chin onto his T-shirt, and clamped his gaze and finger back on the map.
It didn’t seem to bother Simon that there was nothing to see except stars as we knocked our heads between the windows and the seat metal while the driver bashed around in the dark looking for ever more misdirected lanes to plunge down.
Simon kept his eyes fixed firmly on the paper in his lap, judging right and left turns by the sway of the bus and the sound of oaks and hawthorn hedges scraping the metalwork, inching his finger along the lines until we were back on the B1052. Then he breathed a sigh of relief, rubbed the condensation off his window, and looked out.
Haverhill is sunk in a shadow-filled valley, sodden with frozen-food supermarkets and shriveled chain stores. A long, pedestrianized high street splits the town; there are some suffocated churches; HMP Highpoint (where Ruth Wyner and John Brock, two Cambridge charity workers for the homeless who were imprisoned on trumped-up charges for, respectively, five years and four years) is up the road.
(“You can add here,” says Simon, “that I admire John and Ruth as prisoners of conscience.”)
The “Idle Banter” page of Haverhill’s local website had to be shut down because the residents persisted in using it to swear at each other. For some reason Simon wants this wretched place to be connected to Cambridge by rail link.
At the bus stop, Simon squeezed his bag between the doors before they were properly open, propelled himself past a Co-op that glowed in the night with an air of bleakness and additives, and squeezed through a narrow walkway into the pedestrian thoroughfare, once perhaps beautiful, now jackhammered into ugliness by the Planning Officer’s obsession with colored concrete bricks and faux–Victorian ironwork signposts pointing to the toilets.
“This is it,” said Simon, coming to a halt in front of a converted church. We peered through a pyramid-shaped window at a community noticeboard and a poster for the Samaritans. But instead of going inside, he was off again, duffel banging against his side, body tilting right to counteract the pendulum effect, bushy head bowed—more a barge than a wa
lk—past the “Wanted for Murder” posters on the police station railings and the crowd outside the Wetherspoon’s supermarket-sized pub. Where was he going? He is such an irritant to pedestrians.
“Simon?”
Into another church’s yard—out again.
“Simon?”
At the edge of a little lane he paused to investigate the dark for traffic.
“Si—monnnn!”
And disappeared through a twenty-foot hole knocked into a medieval wall.
Always, after the bus station and checking the location of the “venue,” Simon’s priority is to identify, walk to and—with an asexual stiffening of his shoulders—penetrate the public library.
Then he feels positioned.
By the time I’d reached the book stacks myself, Simon had crammed his bag with new booklets, maps, timetables, invitations to charity rose-garden days, promotional flyers for afternoons of barn owls and falconry, recycled-paper adverts for balloon flights over Saffron Walden, pamphlets from the local-history society on the subject of Haverhill’s frankly minuscule role in the Tudor wool trade; and Arriva Transport’s latest handbill about burst pipes.
He lost me again among the shelves. I had to trot up and down the metal rows trying to catch glimpses of him in the rectangular gaps between Woodcarving with a Chainsaw and Collect Fungi on Stamps.
Simon Page 15
