The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien

on her lower lip as she wrote, occasionally looking up and out into the darkening sky beyond the bars of her window as if in search of inspiration. She had always been pretty but suffering had changed her. Her bright blue eyes, swollen from too much crying, had become larger and more luminous than ever before in her gaunt and ravaged face, and in the last few days she had almost stopped eating so that her clothes had now begun to hang off her body, as if they had grown out of her. She wore them carelessly – the buttons on her grey dress were unevenly fastened, and there were stains around the collar.

      The room too was a mess. Clothes, dirty and clean, were everywhere, falling out of drawers, draped over the open doors of the wardrobe in the corner, and an overflowing ashtray competed for space with a framed photograph and a plate containing a half-eaten apple and an untouched sandwich on top of a crowded bookcase by the door.

      ‘I cannot bear the pain any more,’ she wrote. ‘I feel like I’m going mad. I think it would be better to die than to carry on like this. But how? That’s the question. Perhaps I can steal the matches from Jana when she comes in to feed me and then we’ll die together, she and I. Burn until there’s nothing left. There would be justice in that. But I know that at the last moment I won’t be able to go through with it; I’ll draw back – I know I will. Why? Why, in God’s name, why? It’s not fear of death that stops me. I know that. It’s hope; hope for life. Hope is my curse. It always has been. I see that now. God, how much better I would be without it. How much . . .’

      Katya stopped writing suddenly, her pen suspended in mid-air. Outside she could hear footsteps. She knew the sound of them – patent leather soles clicking on the wooden floor. They were coming down the corridor toward her door. Quickly she crossed to the bookcase and pulled out a thick book from the bottom shelf. Back in happier days Katya had hollowed out its interior to create a perfect hiding place for her secret diary. And then for years it had lain there forgotten until she’d begun to keep it again in recent weeks, adding almost daily entries in her tiny, spidery writing.

      She’d just finished replacing the book and got back to her chair when she heard the key turn in the lock behind her and a tall thin woman dressed entirely in black came into the room.

      Jana Claes had never been pretty, but then again she’d never claimed to be. Her nose was too big and her eyes too small for her pallid face, and her lack of any figure emphasized an enduring impression of semi-masculinity. She was almost fifty now, more than twice Katya’s age, and, just as she had always done since she was a girl, she wore her hair, now greying, tied up in a severe bun at the back of her head. Katya had never seen her let it down; just as she had never seen her dressed in anything but black. Unmarried, Jana wore no jewellery except a small silver crucifix that hung on a thin chain around her neck. Bloody hypocrite, Katya always said to herself whenever she saw it.

      The eldest of a family of five, Jana had had domestic responsibility for her siblings since the age of thirteen, when her mother was admitted to hospital one winter afternoon suffering from scarlet fever and had never come back home again. Life was a serious business. There was no room in it for frivolity or vanity. And in all the years that she had known the elder woman, Katya had never once heard her laugh.

      Jana stood in the doorway surveying the room with her thin lips drawn back in an expression of unconcealed disgust.

      ‘Why don’t you clear this up?’ she asked, speaking with the thick Flemish accent that Katya had come to dislike so much.

      ‘Because I choose not to,’ said Katya defiantly.

      ‘It’s horrible,’ said Jana, advancing into the room and closing the door behind her. ‘You have no self-respect.’

      ‘Nor do you. You’re nothing but a common gaoler. That’s all you are.’

      ‘It is for your own good.’

      Katya snorted with contempt. ‘Have you got a light?’ she asked after a moment, taking a cigarette out of a battered packet lying on the desk. It humiliated her to have to ask, but she had no choice. Jana had taken her matches away after an accident with the bedclothes a week earlier, and she badly needed to smoke. Her hands were shaking as she held out the cigarette.

      ‘No. Not now. I need to give you something to make you sleep,’ said Jana, taking a syringe out of her pocket and removing the cover from the needle. ‘Your uncle is worried about you. If you carry on having no sleep, you will be ill. It won’t hurt, I promise. Just a little prick – that’s all.’

      Katya had gone white at the sight of the syringe. Her defiance disappeared like air from a burst balloon, and she backed away into the far corner of the room, terrified.

      ‘No. Not that. Please not that,’ she pleaded with her trembling hands held out in front of her in a gesture combining resistance and supplication in equal measure. ‘It made me sick last time, don’t you remember?’

      ‘It was fine. You went to sleep and then you woke up and you felt a whole lot better,’ said Jana, advancing slowly toward Katya with the syringe in her hand, the needle pointed at the ceiling. She tried to inject a soothing tone into her voice, but her words only seemed to make Katya more hysterical. She regretted coming alone now. There was a crazy look in the girl’s eye like she was toppling over the edge into madness, and Jana wished that she’d brought her brother, Franz, with her, but she hadn’t wanted to bother him. Like Titus, Katya’s uncle, he had a lot of things on his mind. She’d wanted to show her brother that he could rely on her, and last time it had been easy with Katya. She’d been ill in bed and there’d been no trouble.

      Reaching Katya, Jana took sudden hold of her arm and forced her down onto the bed. Katya felt the strength in Jana’s hand. It was like a vice on her wrist, temporarily paralysing her. She felt the prick as the needle pierced her skin, and, as if in slow motion, she watched Jana’s thumb move to press down on the stopper of the syringe. But then, at that precise moment, it was as if some outside force suddenly possessed her: a surge of adrenaline coursed through her body like a charge of electricity, filling her with an overpowering determination not to allow this withered old woman to treat her like she was nothing, a body to be drugged and starved and imprisoned in an attic room at someone else’s whim. She pulled her arm away and pushed up suddenly with all her strength into Jana’s chest, taking the older woman by surprise and sending her reeling back against the corner of the desk, where she sank down onto the floor. The syringe, half-full, fell out of Jana’s hand and rolled away under the bed.

      Getting to her feet, Katya looked down at her adversary. Jana wasn’t moving. Perhaps she’d hit her head on the side of the desk. Quite deliberately Katya took aim and kicked Jana hard in the small of the back. Jana cried out and curled herself up into a ball on the floor.

      ‘You deserved that,’ said Katya with grim satisfaction. ‘I’m not a fool: I know why you’re trying to drug me. It’s because someone’s coming, isn’t it? Just like before. And you don’t want them to see me, don’t want them to know what you’re doing to me up here. Well, too bad. This time I’m going to talk. I’m going to tell them everything you’ve done. And when I’ve finished, I hope they lock you up and throw away the key. So you’ll know what it feels like.’

      Katya felt like kicking Jana some more but resisted the temptation. Glancing out the window, she saw that the courtyard was still empty, but nevertheless she felt sure that a car would soon be pulling up. And if she was to stand a chance of telling the visitor her story, she needed to find somewhere to hide until he or she arrived. For a moment Katya remained in the centre of the room, swaying backward and forward on the balls of her feet, her brow furrowed in concentration, but then, drawing a deep breath, she seemed to make up her mind.

      Crossing to the door, she smiled. The key was still in the lock. Jana hadn’t taken it out when she came in, and so she wouldn’t have to search the older woman’s pockets and run the risk of another fight. It seemed like a good omen. With one backward glance, Katya closed the door, locked it, and then, with the key in her hand, ran away down the corridor. But before she’d reached the end she felt her legs buckle beneath her as the drug started to take effect, and she had to lean on the wall for support before she turned the corner and started down the stairs.