The Proof: Chapter 2

The couple who lived next door were called Kate and Jeremy Hapgood. They were young, in their twenties, and they often interrupted their neighbours' sleep. Because they hadn't bothered to close the curtains last night, their studio flat — identical to all the other flats in the block — was flooded with early morning sun. Faint shadows from the window frames intersected on the walls, while the corner of a mirror spread an angular rainbow across the roof. While Angela washed her dishes next door, Jeremy was looking at his penis. Perhaps due to the brilliant light, it seemed very red to him, red and naked and wet. It looks real, was what he was thinking. He hadn't used a condom and Kate wasn't on the pill: they were trying for a baby, and somehow, at that moment, their baby seemed real.

Kate was lying on her stomach; her legs were slightly apart and her husband's hand was nestled between them. Her eyes were shut, giving the brightness of the room a warm tone, orange or pink. She wasn't thinking about anything. But there was a thought in her head all the same. A thought about closed eyes, tiny and hooded, that stayed closed as they entered the world of light.

A few seconds later, Jeremy stood up, rising backwards off his knees from the end of the mattress. He was frowning because he was looking for something — a towel or something to wipe himself up with. He found his boxer shorts in the shipwreck at the foot of the bed and cleaned himself on the tickly fabric.

They had been married for almost a year now. Both of them were naked, apart from their rings. Jeremy was pacing around the room with his penis springing forwards from his skinny frame, his hair sticking up from his head. Kate rolled over and raised her head from the pillow. She was smiling because she thought he was preparing a speech. He was:

"I've got a theory, you know," he said with his sticky, cerebral voice. "In fact, I've got a theorem — about sex and when it's most likely to lead to babies." Kate kept smiling and flopped her head back on the pillow.

"Put simply, I think that good sex (and here I mean sex both partners enjoy) not whatever it is that the media want us to think of as good sex, to send us running off to their health-clubs, or cosmetics counters, or whatever it is they're trying to sell us… Where was I?"

"Good sex," murmured Kate.

"Yes. Good sex is more likely to lead to babies. Good sex is more likely to lead to babies because," he drew the word out, arranging his thoughts, "it's in the interest of evolution (if you'll allow me the crime of thinking of evolution as an architect with a plan and not what it is, just a statistical, you know, an inevitable…"

Though his voice trailed off, his expression, and his now drooping pointer, remained as didactic as ever. "If you were a chimpanzee, shared by several males, it would be essential for your body to have some criterion by which to select the father of your child."

"mmm hmm," she said, looking at the prismatic bars of colour on the roof.

"It would be essential in fact, that your body knew how to select the father with whom you had the most… the most click, or the connection that said that this man is good for my life and his genes will make a good, or even a perfect child." His forehead creased: he wasn't as pleased with that sentence as the last one. He stopped talking and a silence stretched out in the room.

He lay on the bed, face-down, with his arms tucked under his body and his pinched white buttocks exposed. He worked in a library, and Kate thought that if he could he would live there as well. He rolled over to accept a cigarette, passed by Kate, who was lighting up, lying on her back, watching the smoke drift around in the light. They inhaled together, feeling calm spread over calm. She was thinking that her husband's way of being happy wasn't so different from hers, that his flood of words was a bit like the wash of half thoughts in her head. But it was definitely weirder.

"You know, when I said theorem and not theory, this is really what I meant: that it wasn't empirical evidence that led me to my proposition, but a process of deduction, or more like a feeling that such a thing could be deduced, because cold logic and this feeling of, you know, of everything being right and everything being perfect, are closer than most people think…" Jeremy was sitting up now, against the wall. He had interrupted himself to take a draw on his cigarette, carrying out the motion gently and easily, the way he did all things that needed no thought.

He went back to talking, rapidly, his voice growing to a kind of whine. In Kate's ears his words were not sentences but sounds, continual and soothing, like the cars in the street beneath their window. She had heard his monologues before, knew all about his theorems and theories. She had the feeling, in fact, that she knew all about everything — or at least that everything was contained in her thoughts, the way a tree is contained in a seed. When her cigarette ended she stubbed it out in a wine-glass, drew her legs towards her chubby nude body. Jeremy's chatter still filled the room; he was using words like crystalline and concept and luminous, and also the word he seemed to like most: perfect. Apparently he was describing their future child.

"I'm thinking of a child made out of this moment," he was saying, "not out of biology like normal, just out of the sheer rightness of this luminous morning and the way we feel, because I've always felt, and I know it's stupid (I guess I've always been a closet Platonist) but I've always felt there is a higher and more perfect concept working above us, that determines the way things really happen and only lets us see just enough to think we know what's going on. I mean we see things as right for a reason, because they are really, and this time is so right that our child will be right, and she will have a lovely, crystalline mind that will perceive things beautifully and clearly."

Kate looked bored, as though she hadn't listened to a word he said. But she had, to one word at least: she — as in she will have a lovely etc. mind. And that word had upset her. She realised that she'd always pictured their child as a boy — a lusty, happy, baby boy.

"Could you open the window?" she asked, only because she knew he would do it.

When Jeremy saw her looking pensive he bent forwards to give her a hug. Then he stood and walked to the window, sliding it open with a little grunt. The sound of the street got louder, as if he'd turned it up; and it felt like the sun got louder too. He was standing at the open window, facing out with his hands on his hips, not concerned by his nakedness or the people in the apartments across the street. He was looking at everything, turning his head towards the clouds, the buildings, the glints of light off the moving cars.

"And the lord saw the light, that it was good," he said, in his quoting voice. He turned around and made an expansive gesture with his thin arms, even thinner with the sun behind them, leeching their edges. "I really think we made something today. I shouldn't speak too soon about these things and I don't want to jinx us but I really think what we did, you know, was special… " He felt silly now, a smile was showing on his silhouette face. "I talk too much," he said, and Kate laughed out loud, maybe too loud. His face took on a look she knew well, the look of a schoolboy with a crappy report, and her smile was softening, she was up, pulling on a t-shirt, stretching out her arms. They cuddled standing beside the bed.

They still had their arms around each other, only now they were swaying together, doing a static little waltz. Jeremy said that he liked being naked and Kate agreed, that he liked being naked. They laughed, looking at each others eyes; then they turned towards the window.

Outside it was Sunday: you could tell by the way people drove, or walked their dogs, or lingered behind their open windows. It was a lovely morning, one of the last of the summer; so lovely there was no need for either of them to point it out. With one arm across Kate's shoulder, Jeremy's eyes danced across the ranges of their urban view, his thoughts hummed like the telephone wires strung along the streets. Kate watched too, but her gaze was less mobile. As she felt the warm sun on her face, she reached downwards to stroke her belly.