'I wanted a red room," she said. "But I didn't have the courage to go all the way.'
'Like Christian's Red Room of Pain in Fifty Shades?'
'Have you read it?'
'Yes - well, only because Madeleine, the head waitress, left it lying around reception. I read it during my shifts. I would never have read it otherwise.'
'Did you like it?'
'No?' I watched her face to see if this was the right answer. 'It gave me nightmares. The violence. I hated Anastasia's - submissiveness?'
'Quite.' Now she looked angry. 'That book is poison. Pure toxic poison. It is fortuitous that Falling Out of Fate coincided more or less with that ... trash.' Her face became normal again. 'I wanted this room to be like the red room of Jane Eyre's childhood. Where she goes as a little girl - or rather, where she gets locked inside. There she has visions. She has hysteria. Hysteria is the corralling of women's natural jouissance under patriarchy.'