“It's a sickness,” he said to his daughter. “Those people have problems they're afraid to face. Perversion looks like the answer while all the while it's only part of what ails them.”
“So you think,” Nicola reminded him gently. “The reality could be something different though, couldn't it? An aberration to you might be perfectly normal to someone else. In fact, you might be the aberration in their eyes.”
He supposed this was the case, he admitted. But wasn't normality determined by the numbers? Wasn't that what the word norm meant in the first place? Wasn't the norm decided by what the most people did?
“That would make cannibalism normal, Dad, among cannibals.”
“Among cannibals, I suppose it is.”
“And if a group among the cannibals decides it doesn't like eating human flesh, are they abnormal? Or can we say they have tastes that might have undergone a change? And if someone from our society goes out and joins the cannibals and discovers he has a taste for human flesh that he wasn't aware he had, is he abnormal? And to whom?”
Andy had smiled at that. He'd said, “You're going to make a very fine lawyer.”
And that comment had led them to hell.
“As to that, Dad,” she'd begun, “as to the law …”
She'd started with her decision not to work for Will Upman, to remain for the summer in London instead. He'd thought at first that she meant she'd found a placement more to her liking with a firm in town. Perhaps, he'd thought hopefully, she's got herself established at one of the Inns of Court. That wasn't where he dreamed she'd end up, but he wasn't blind to the compliment such a position paid to his daughter. He'd said, “I'm disappointed, of course. Your mum will be as well. But we always looked at Will as a fallback if nothing better turned up. What has?”
She told him. He thought at first that she was joking, although Nicola had never been a child to joke when it came to what she wanted to do. In fact, she'd always stated her intentions exactly as she stated them that day in Islington: Here's the plan, here's why, here's the intended result.
“I thought you ought to know,” she'd concluded. “You have a right, since you were paying for law college. And I'll pay you back for that, by the way.” Again that smile, that sweet and infuriating Nicola smile which had always partnered whatever she announced as a fait accompli. I'm running away, she'd tell her parents when they'd refused an unreasonable request. I won't be here after school today. In fact, I'm not going to school at all. Don't expect me for dinner. Or for breakfast tomorrow. I'm running away. “I should have the money to pay you before the end of summer. I would have had it already, but we had to buy supplies and they cost quite a lot. Would you like to see them, by the way?”
He'd continued to believe it was some sort of joke. Even when she'd brought out her equipment and explained the use of each obscene item: the leather whips, the braces studded with small chrome nails, the masks and manacles, the shackles and collars. “You see, Dad, some people just can't get it off unless there's pain or humiliation involved,” she told her father as if he hadn't spent years exposed to just about every kind of human aberration. “They want the sex—well, that's natural, isn't it? I mean, don't we all want it?—but unless it's connected to something degrading or painful, they either don't get satisfaction from it or they can't even do it in the first place. And then there are others who seem to feel the need to atone for something. It's like they've committed a sin, and if they take their medicine like they're supposed to—six of the best to naughty little boys and all that—they're happy, they're forgiven, and they get on with their business. They go home to the wife and kiddies, and they feel, well, they feel … I suppose it sounds awfully odd to say it, but they seem to feel refreshed.” She appeared to read something on her father's face, then, that creased her own, because she reached across the table at which they sat and earnestly covered Andy's clenched fist with her hand. “Dad, I'm always the dom. You do know that, don't you? I wouldn't ever let someone do to me what I do to … Well, I'm just not interested. I do it because the money's fabulous, it's just beyond belief, and while I'm young and nice-looking and strong enough to do eight or nine sessions a day …” She smiled an impish smile, as she reached for the final object to show him. “The pony tail's the most ridiculous, actually. You can't imagine how silly a seventy-year-old bloke looks when he's got this thing hanging out of his … well, you know.”
“Say it,” he'd said to her, finding his voice at last.
She'd looked at him blankly, the black plastic plug with its black leather streamers dangling from her lovely slender hand. “What?”
“The word. Hanging from his what? If you can't say it, how can you do it?”