The Proof: Chapter 7
By johnshade
- 837 reads
The autumn after that Charlie moved on to secondary school. It took him a while to settle in, but he gradually returned to his former pattern of scholastic excellence and social withdrawal. Even more than his solitude, he was marked out by the eerie calm of his behaviour — at a time when lust and anger were erupting in his peers like the acne on their faces. For the most part, Jeremy was delighted by this quiet brilliance, hoping to fulfil at second hand the intellectual ambitions that a career as a head librarian had never satisfied. But Kate found it steadily more worrying. She remembered her brothers at Charlie's age, hitting each other and pretending they were playing, or pinging her bra strap until she started to cry. She wondered where her parenting had gone wrong.
One evening, when Charlie was sixteen, his parents were sitting in the dining room drinking glasses of red wine. It had been highly recommended by the food and drink critic in the magazine supplement of their Sunday newspaper. The lights were low, muted by the touch-sensitive dimmer pad on the wall. (Jeremy had problems with the pad at first, slapping it impatiently and muttering about "darkness visible." But he got used to in the end.) They were discussing the wine — a little unconvincingly, using terms like well-rounded, oakey, full-bodied — when they heard a shuffling sound outside. A confused picture came to Kate, of moth's wings and paper lampshades. A few seconds later the door opened a crack and the shuffling came again. This time she had a more straightforward vision, of her son crossing the hall to stare intently at a calendar, having lost the nerve to come in. Jeremy was thinking about something else. Eventually the door opened all the way and a teenage boy walked in. He had tucked his heavy metal tee shirt into a pair of tightly fitting jeans. His long hair was parted on one side in a line as straight as a ruler. His skin was so pale it was almost grey.
"Hello," he said, adjusting his glasses.
"Hi Charlie," said Kate, "why don't you sit down?"
Charlie pulled out a seat and sat down. With the three of them together it was easy to see the ancestry of his face. Its shape — the doughy roundness of the cheeks, flatness of the bones, asymmetry of the jaw — was all his mother's. But both the pallid skin and the hint of tension in the muscles beneath it had unmistakably come from his father. It was only the eyes that were inconclusive. Sometimes they darted around the room, rapidly gathering information, while at others they were suddenly, perilously still.
"To what do we owe the pleasure of your company?" asked Jeremy.
"Nothing," said Charlie, "it's a present."
They laughed at his deadpan delivery — though they were never quite sure when he was doing it deliberately.
"So what have you got planned for tonight?" asked Kate.
"Nothing."
"Well… maybe you'd like to join us old timers for a drink?"
Jeremy began to pour Charlie a glass of wine.
"God you really are alcoholics you two — Mr and Mrs alcoholic!" said Charlie.
The bottle froze at an angle just shallow enough to stop it pouring: Jeremy was awaiting further input.
Kate said, "You don't have drink anything if you don't want to Charlie — I just thought you might like to try some of this lovely wine."
"Lead us not into temptation," said Charlie, and again his parents laughed uncertainly.
Jeremy put the bottle down. "Forgive him, lord, for he knows not what he does."
His son seemed to like this. "Blessed are the sober," he said, "for they shall inherit the Earth."
As they carried on their biblical banter, Charlie's eyes began to jump around the room. They took in the tasteful print framed on the wall, the polished shine of the mahogany table, the large wooden hoops strung along the curtain rod. The only thing they didn't look at was Kate. When he talks to his father, she thought, it's as if he's skating on ice. So what did that make her? The sea. The murky unwelcoming sea.
"Charlie," she broke in, "are you feeling okay?"
"Yes mum. I'm fine."
"I only ask because you seem so quiet these days — I mean we hardly see you any more. You're always up in that room of yours, working on your computer."
"You should see some of the things he's done," put in Jeremy, "they're really quite impressive."
"I'm sure they are," Kate went on, "I'm sure they're very impressive. But you can't work all the time — you have to have some fun now and again."
Charlie definitely wasn't having fun now. He was staring fixedly at the glass in front of him. The highlights that curled around it were lost in the rich red darkness of the wine.
"Would you be happier," he said, "if I drank myself unconscious every night of the week?"
"Of course not," said Kate, "you know that's not what I meant."
"Or maybe you'd prefer if I were rubbing myself into girls all day long?"
Kate looked blank for a moment.
"Are you sure you're okay?"
"I'm fine mum. I'm going to my room now."
He marched out of the room and slammed the door.
Soon afterwards Kate rose to her feet and followed him out. As she climbed the stairs she wondered if her son would be less intense, less concentrated, if he wasn't an only child. She and Jeremy had always intended to have another baby, and neither their doctor nor their lack of perseverance could explain why they hadn't. It was as if something had never quite been right again — the conjunction of the planets maybe, or the precise balance of vitamins in their diet.
She knocked on his bedroom door and waited to be invited in. If she was honest, she would have liked to find him crying on his bed, receptive to her caresses and apologies without a wall of irony around him. But dry eyes watched her enter from the swivel chair in front of the computer desk. She said hello, contritely, and asked if he minded if she took a seat. "Yes," he answered, administering the joke with a smile. She sat on the edge of the bed and glanced around the room, noticing the way he'd spaced his posters evenly across the walls. One of them showed a woman riding a dragon; another had tour dates for a band called Orgy of Slaughter.
"I recently completed a program," he said, "do you want to see it?"
"Oh yes!" A program — that was something you did on computers.
He swivelled around and began to type. She walked up behind him and saw a empty black window with a line of characters stuttering across it. When he hit return another window opened. This one wasn't empty though; it was full of colour, hard bands of colour that stepped through the rainbow as they curved around an intricate island of black. He tapped a button and the screen zoomed in on a section of coast. The image redrew in stages, sweeping from left to right, becoming more detailed with every pass. At the end it was clear that the sea was full of other islands, some nothing but tiny black dots, others large enough to have satellites of their own. The next time he zoomed in the screen looked almost as it had at first.
He stopped for a moment and half turned round; Kate's blank face filled with appreciation.
"That's amazing. Did you do all that yourself?"
He said nothing, only started to type again, very quickly, a stream of hyphens and slashes and long numbers with dots in the middle of them. A moment later a new set of islands appeared — pale blue this time and threaded along clusters of spiral arms. The azure sea lightened around them, as if thinning over sheets of ice, and their interiors rose to snowy ridges whose curving shapes seemed to mimic the form of the spirals outside. There was barely time for Kate to coo encouragingly before the screen changed again. It was fire red now, with a dark green snake trapped in the flames. Or almost a snake — when she looked closely she saw numerous projections sprouting off it, in every size and direction, but all shaped like the body they sprung from. And they too were covered in serpentine spurs. As Charlie continued to type parameters, using his pinky to tap return, Kate's eyes began to glaze over. She felt like he was showing her another world, one formed of numbers and light, a strange mathematical place where beauty was measured in symmetries and patterns and a human face would look as flawed as a broken shell.
Charlie's knees jiggled under the desk.
Finally he stopped typing and waited for her to ask a question. She didn't, so he answered it anyway.
"They're Julia sets."
"Who's Julia?" she squeaked.
"Gaston Julia was a French mathematician. The parameterised family of his complex sets is the source of the Mandlebrot set."
"Oh — I see."
The room was silent for a while. Finally Kate said, "listen Charlie — I'm sorry about what I said earlier. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, I really didn't. It's just — we worry about you sometimes."
Charlie was still facing the computer. The screen was blank and grey.
"You shouldn't," he said, in his monotone voice.
Kate smiled at his back. "I'm not saying I want you to drink yourself silly every night. I'd be even more worried if you were doing that. I just think a boy your age should get out and about sometimes — and give his poor brain a rest."
She reached forwards and gently tapped his head with her knuckles. As though activated by her touch, he swivelled his chair and she watched his face rotate towards her. He spun a little way past her, then back again, kept spinning the chair slowly back and forth.
"It's exciting," she said, "an exciting age to be. There's so much there Charlie. So much to discover."
She didn't feel like she was explaining herself very well. She glanced at the window and saw the colours of the bedroom reflected thinly, the night behind them, her son's pale face suspended in the darkness beyond the garden.
"What about Andrew. Why do you never see Andrew any more?"
Charlie shrugged and said nothing. Kate remembered when her son's new friend had come round for dinner. She remembered taking away his half full plate to end the struggle between his politeness and the alien, garlicky food.
"Why don't you phone him up?"
"I don't know," muttered Charlie, "his friends…"
"What about his friends?" There was an edge in Kate's voice.
A long pause. "I don't think they are comfortable with people like me."
"What do you mean, people like you?"
"Intelligent people."
"They're no different from you, silly. And anyway it's not up to them whether Andrew is your friend. Just try ringing him up and see what happens — you've nothing to lose."
He nodded his head, satisfied with this line of reasoning. There was no dimmer switch on the light in his bedroom. The overhead lamp was harsh and stark and it tinted everything yellow. If Kate had wanted to know, he could have told her why this was — why it was difficult to make pure white light, why the filament in the bulb emitted some frequencies more readily than others. But she didn't want to know.
"Come here," she said, "and give me a hug."
He scooted towards her without leaving his chair, wheels trundling on the carpet. Then he stood and was caught in her embrace. To begin with he only put one hand behind her, but soon he began to feel less awkward and squeezed her firmly with both arms. Then something happened that he couldn't explain and tears welled up in his eyes.
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