The Proof: Chapter 5

In a couple of years Charlie was old enough to start nursery school. He was happy there, as far as anyone could tell, or he would afterwards remember, running around with the other children and playing with fuzzy felt and multicoloured blocks. After that came primary school, a low brick building with two wings and two playgrounds, to separate the younger kids from the older. This school he would definitely remember, albeit at the wrong scale, giantess teachers and normal sized tables and chairs. He would remember glue moulded to the bottom of plastic pots, paper wet with poster paints, experiments with batteries and tiny lightbulbs, soft wax crayons, the smell of vomit mixed with disinfectant, the wooden bars on the walls of the gym. He would also remember being told he was a very clever boy. From an early age, he tended to get top grades in tests and report cards, especially in science and mathematics, where the grades often had little words — exceptional, outstanding, brilliant — written in red ink beside them.

In spite of his academic success though, as he neared his eleventh birthday it became increasingly clear that his education was incomplete.

"You should tell him," said Kate, "it's a boy thing."

"I think you should tell him — you're better at communicating on this kind of topic, when it's not really abstract but more, um, of the flesh." Jeremy replied.

Kate said nothing.

"Where is he?" asked Jeremy.

"In his room, playing."

There was a kind of reproach in the way Kate said playing, that they had let their son's infancy drag on for so long; but there was also a kind of dread, that they no longer knew what exactly he was playing with.

On the way, Jeremy stopped at a bookcase in the hall and pulled a large medical textbook off a shelf. He was nervous, and the weight of the book somehow made him feel calmer. When he reached the bedroom he knocked on the door. "Charlie?" he enquired. "Come in," came the reply. Inside, Charlie was sitting on a neatly made bed, whose royal blue duvet had a print of a racing car repeated across it. The whole room was spotlessly clean: every toy and book was in its place, apart from a brightly painted tube he was holding to his eye.

"Aha, you're playing with the kaleidoscope again," said Jeremy, "that must be your favourite toy!" Charlie turned to his father, still looking though the painted tube. "Yes," he said, rotating the end of it.

Inside the kaleidoscope, the light that reflected off Jeremy's face was diffused by a translucent plastic cap. It passed through a circular chamber packed with beads of coloured glass, then bounced off the prism of mirrors lining the inside of the tube. By the time it reached Charlie's eyes it was lost in a whirl of colourful patterns that kept collapsing and reforming as he turned his hand, dividing and coalescing again, constantly changing, but never losing the snowflake symmetry that made them so beautifully the same.

"Listen…" said Jeremy, but Charlie kept squinting through the toy. He was playing a game that as far as he knew he had invented. The idea was simple: to try to look through the patterns to see the objects on the other side. It was all about seeing familiar things differently, more cleanly — without the mess of lopsided reality that usually gets in the way. Right now for example, as he turned the tube and the snowflakes rose and rotated into each other, he felt like he could make out his father's mobile face, his changing expressions, more perfectly than ever before.

"Listen, Charlie, I think you should put that down now."

Charlie laid the kaleidoscope flat on the duvet, parallel to his legs. Jeremy continued, "there's something we need to talk about. To use the old fashioned phrase, it's about 'the birds and the bees — although that's a silly thing to call it, because it's not about birds or bees at all, it's about you and other people."

"Why's it called the birds and the bees then?" asked Charlie.

"Ha ha," laughed Jeremy, "that's a good question. In many ways the whole history of sex has been one of foolish euphemisms — that is, the names people give things when they don't want to come out and call them what they are."

"What's sex?" asked Charlie.

Jeremy laughed again, not getting any less nervous. "That's basically what we're going to talk about. I guess I good place to start would be this: do you know where babies come from?"

"From the vagina," answered Charlie, and Jeremy was surprised to see a smirk lifting the sides of his son's mouth.

"That's right," he replied. "And do you know where the vagina is?" he went on.

Charlie burst into foolish laughter, turning red and shaking as he tried to stifle it. "No," he stuttered at last.

"Well now you do," said his father. He opened his textbook and held up a diagram that said 'Female External Genitalia.' There was a sektch of a pair of open legs and between them a shape like a candle's flame; its halo was labelled Pubic Hair, its contours of different tint, getting hotter as they moved inwards, were Labia Majora, Labia minora, Hymen and Vaginal Opening. In the middle of the glow there were darkspots — Clitoris, Urethera, Clitoral Hood — and beneath them all a black hollow called Anus.

Charlie stopped laughing.

Jeremy turned the page. Now his son was looking at the Female Internal Genitalia: multicoloured pipes and balls spreading out from a cavity that looked like the skull of an ox. The diagram seemed to have a calming effect on him: his cheeks lost their colour, his thoughts cleared, his mouth filled with questions about fallopian tubes and ovarian ligaments — the kind of questions his teachers loved to hear. Once he had answered them to his satisfaction, Jeremy turned the page. There was a picture of penis on it. It had pubic hair above it, a scrotum below it, thighs beside it, but mostly it was a picture of a penis. Or that's how it looked to Charlie. His mouth was twitching again, he was looking at the ground, trying to stop his shoulders shaking.

Jeremy pretended not to notice, in a way that made it clear that he had. "Well I suppose you know what that is already," he said blandly. He turned the page to a cut-away view of the same diagram. They discussed the testes, the prostate gland, the corpus cavernosa, before he turned again.

Next came a drawing of a man and a woman having sex, in the missionary position. A cross section had been cut through their pelvises, bisecting their organs. "This is sexual intercourse," announced Jeremy, with authority, "and this is how babies are made. The man inserts his erect penis into the woman's vagina, and the couple thrust together until the sperm produced in the man's testes travels up the inside of the penis and into the vagina. When the sperm meets the egg inside her ovaries, a tiny baby is made that then grows bigger inside her womb, and that's why women have big tummies when they're pregnant."

Charlie nodded, gradually regaining his composure. He was a very clever boy. He could understand the anatomy of men and women, the mechanics of the sexual act, even the complicated voyage to childbirth. But there was something that confused him: something about the expression on the couple's faces.

"Dad," he asked, "why have they got their eyes shut?"

Jeremy didn't know what to say. "Good question! What you have to bear in mind is that sex isn't only about babies, it's also about love. Or to put it another way it's about pleasure, and when people want to feel the pleasure of love" — he was relieved to have conflated these two again — "sometimes it helps them to close their eyes."

Charlie closed his eyes.

Jeremy laughed. "I'm afraid it won't work on your own."

Charlie reacted as if he'd been slapped. The boy was oversensitive, Jeremy had noticed this before: he was fairly confident that his wife was to blame for the relevant genes. "You know what," he went on, "maybe I should just leave you with this to read," he held out the book, with difficulty, in one hand, "and if you've got any questions or anything is bothering you, you just come to me or mummy." Charlie brought the book down to his bed and laid it flat. He shifted position to sit with his legs crossed then opened it. "Thanks dad," he said. Jeremy was ready to leave, but he still had the feeling that his work wasn't done.

"Charlie, was there something else you wanted to ask me?"

Charlie looked down, at the labelled diagrams and blocks of text. Then he looked up at his father.

"What does it feel like?"

"What?" asked Jeremy. "Oh — I see what you mean!" He laughed again. "You'll just have to find that out for yourself, my boy," he said, ruffling Charlie's hair.

His touch triggered nerves below the follicles on Charlie's head. Encoded in pulses of electric charge, it was passed between ions, along dendrites, through nuclei and axons to his spinal cord. From there it branched upwards, towards billions of discharging neurons, crackling synapses, and was lost in the storm of sensations that forked through his brain.

Charlie had a glazed look as he said goodnight to his father. The tingling in his scalp seemed to last much longer than it should have. A few minutes later he closed the textbook and hefted it onto one of his shelves; then he turned the light out and went to bed.

Jeremy slept well that night. Charlie slept badly, at the mercy of violent dreams.