“Maybe. What do you want from me?”
“For the moment I’d just like grounding in a few basics. I can understand a lot about things most people don’t even want to think about—robbery, murder, even rape—but I can’t seem to grasp the motivation for something like this.”
Jenny took a deep breath and held it a moment. “All right. I’ll do what I can. Shall we order first, though?” She called over the waitress and gave their orders, asking for a glass of white wine for herself right now, and a coffee for Banks, then she sat back in her chair. “First you’d better tell me the details so far,” she said.
Banks told her. Before he finished, the food arrived, and they both tucked in.
Jenny pushed her plate away and set the half-full wineglass in front of her. Banks ordered another coffee.
“I don’t really know where to start,” she said. “I mean, it’s not really my field.”
“You do know something about sexual deviance, though.”
“Honestly, Alan, you make me sound like a real pervert. Basically, nobody really knows what causes someone to be a paedophile or a rapist or a sadist. They don’t necessarily realize they’re doing anything wrong.”
“Are you telling me that a man who sexually assaults little children doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong?”
“Depends what you mean by wrong. He would know he’s breaking the law, of course, but… . He’s only satisfying desires he can’t help feeling. He never asked to feel them in the first place. And many also feel tremendous guilt and remorse.”
“For doing something they don’t even think is wrong? You make it sound almost legitimate.”
“You asked. I’m just telling you what little I know.”
“I’m sorry. Go on.”
“Look, you might think a person is simply born the way he or she is, but sexual behaviour isn’t fixed from the start. There are theories that almost everything is biologically based, caused by chemicals, or by genes. For what it’s worth, most studies indicate that sexual behaviour is mostly a matter of learning. At first, every
thing is diffuse, in a kind of flux—polymorphous perverse, I believe Freud called infant sexuality. It depends on a number of factors what preferences come to the fore.”
“Like what?”
“Experience. Learning. Family. They’re probably the most important. You try something, and if you like it, you do it again. That’s experience. Many people are given no information about sex, or such wrongheaded information that they become very confused. That’s learning, or lack of it. Even what we call normal sexuality is a dark, murky thing at best. Look at the extremes of sexual jealousy, of how sex and desire can so easily turn to violence. There’s loss of control. Then there’s the association of orgasm with death. Did you know it used to be called the ‘little death’?”
“You don’t make it sound like much fun.”
“That’s the point,” Jenny said. “For a lot of people, it isn’t. Desire is a ball and chain they can’t get rid of, or a ringmaster they don’t dare disobey. Sexuality has lots of possible outcomes other than what we label ‘normal’ or socially acceptable. It’s learned behaviour. When you’re prepubescent or adolescent, any object or situation could become stimulating. Remember the thrill you used to get looking at pictures of naked women? It’s easy as an adolescent to get fixated on things like underwear, big breasts, the image rather than the real thing. Remember our peeping Tom? That was his particular fixation, a visual stimulation.
“It doesn’t take long before most of us start to prefer certain stimuli to others. Pretty soon sexual excitement and satisfaction become limited to a certain, fairly narrow range. That’s what we call normal. Your good old, socially approved, heterosexual sex. The problem with most sexual deviants, though, is that they can’t handle
what we regard as normal personal relationships. Many try, but they fail. It’s a lot more complicated than that, of course. It may not be apparent on the surface that they’ve failed, for example. They may become very good at faking it in order to cover up their real needs and actions.”
“So what kind of person are we talking about? You said it’s someone who can’t handle ordinary relation-
“I’ll have to do some research and see what I can
come up with, but your basic deviant is probably pretty
much the chap-next-door type, with some very notable
exceptions, of course. By the way, you don’t have to look
around so nervously, you can smoke if you want. Giselle
will fetch an ashtray. Remember, it’s a French restaurant.
Everyone smokes over there.”
Banks lit up and Giselle duly brought the ashtray along with their bill. “Go on,” he said. “You were telling me about the chap next door.”
“It’s just that most sex offenders become skilled at leading quite normal lives on the surface. They learn to play the game. They can hold down a job, keep a marriage going, even raise children—”
“Paedophiles?”
“Yes.”
“I must admit that’s a surprise,” said Banks. “I’ve come across psychopaths and deviants of various kinds before—I mean, I’m not entirely ignorant on the subject —and it has often amazed me how they keep their secrets. Look at Dennis Nilsen, for Christ’s sake, chopping up kids and putting their heads on the ring to boil while he takes his dog for a walk, saying hello to the neighbours. Such a nice, quiet man.” Banks shook his head. “I know the Boston Strangler was married, and Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. But how the hell can a paedophile keep a thing like that hidden from his wife and kids?”
“People can become very adept at keeping secrets if they have to, Alan. You don’t spend all your life in someone else’s company, under someone’s scrutiny, do you? Surely you managed to find time alone to masturbate when you were a kid? And you probably thought about it a fair bit, too, anticipated the picture you’d look at or the girl you’d imagine undressing. The whole thing takes on a kind of magical intensity, a ritualistic element, if you like. A sex offender will simply spend all his free time anticipating
