Simon Tolkien - The King of Diamonds

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.

The first thing that Jana felt when she came to was the intensity of the pain in her head. Her right temple was throbbing so hard that she felt it would burst. It terrified her. Involuntarily she put her hand up to her hairline and felt blood seeping between her fingers. She opened her eyes and the room started to turn, spinning round and round, faster and faster. Quickly she closed them again tight shut, but it was too late. She was turning herself now, and, as she felt her stomach heaving upward, she leant over to the side and was violently sick onto Katya’s ruby-red carpet. The movement and the retching made her suddenly conscious of a new hurt low in her back. For a while she lay motionless on the floor facing her own vomit while the two pains fought each other for supremacy until finally they fused together into one solid agony. And the pain was mixed up with shame and fear. She knew what she had done: she had messed everything up. She shuddered as she thought of what Franz would say when he found her. She had to get up, to warn them before this Vanessa woman arrived. Because she didn’t know where Katya was. Not in the room certainly. The terrible, shameful retching had at least cleared her head and she found she could open her eyes now without the furniture rising up to meet her. She took in the unmade bed, the syringe that had rolled away underneath it, a photograph of Katya’s dead parents on top of the bookcase, and beyond it the door. It was closed. She felt in her pockets for the key, without success. Like a fool she must have left it in the door when she came in, and, if so, Katya would almost certainly have locked her in as she fled.

The pain came back in waves, and for a moment she thought she would pass out again, and perhaps she might have if she hadn’t heard the sound of a car driving up and parking in the courtyard below. Now she knew she had almost no time left — a minute or two at most — before Titus opened the front door and brought his guest inside. And so, gritting her teeth, she dragged herself across the carpet to the door and then, putting her hand up to the handle, she found her worst suspicions confirmed. It was indeed locked. But she’d already thought of what to do. She reached down and took off her shoe and then, using all her strength, banged it on the door frame again and again, while she shouted out for help. After half a minute she came to the end of her strength and fell back in a swoon. But it was enough.