Superheroes

Chapter Sixteen - Asylum

                                         Chapter Sixteen - Asylum

I used to adore school holidays.

Before my mother passed away, we used to break the stereotype of rich families having bad relationships. I didn’t live up to the cliché of never seeing my parents, and neither one of them was emotionally distant.

It was great, actually. Since my mother’s only employment was as a socialite, she had a lot of free time, and she dedicated a large portion of it to planning for the holidays. She ensured that my father got time off work months in advance so that we could all be together. If he ever dared to pull the stunt of claiming that something had come up at work and he needed to head over to the office, then he had to endure my mother’s wrath. She was generally a very gentle person, but when angered she was more dragon than human. After five minutes of facing her, my father would quickly remember that the urgent meeting had been rescheduled for next week and he could stay after all.  

What she organised for us ranged from the atrociously lavish to the downright goofy. The summer of my twelfth year was spent touring the world, my mother taking me to all of her favourite locations. For Christmas when I was fourteen, she signed us all up for some cheesy ‘Come Meet Father Christmas’ extravaganza, which would have been perfect were I still five years old. Still, it was worth it to see my father amongst the constant screaming of hyperactive children and the blaring Christmas music. By the end he was muttering death threats under his breath. My mother, on the other hand, loved it.

After she passed away, however, all of that stopped. My father said he didn’t have time anymore, and I no longer argued. I had insisted last Christmas that we should at least go tree shopping together, like we had with my mother when she was still alive. The silence held between us only highlighted her absence, and when we returned empty-handed my father locked himself away in his study for the rest of the day. In an attempt to apologise for pushing him, I prepared a peace offering of festive hot chocolate, but decided against giving it to him when I approached the study door. I couldn’t quite block out the sound of him crying.

Home changed too. My father was an affluent businessman, owning a family business that manufactured sporting equipment, and he had shares in dozens of others. With my mother coming from old Indian money, the two fortunes combined to mean that we lived in unadulterated luxury. The house could more accurately be described as a mansion, with four separate wings, enough rooms to house a small village, and ten square acres of land surrounding it. Victorian in design, it not only looked like something out of the movies, but it had in fact been rented out for the filming of a period drama one summer. 

The scale of the house was dizzying. It was easy to get lost within the back passages, designed for the servants of past eras. Whenever my two English cousins visited, both a similar age to me, the games of hide and seek that went underway were epic in scale. The youngest once fell asleep curled up underneath a bed in one of the guest rooms, and they weren’t found till morning.

Before my mother’s death, the enormity of the building was a virtue. Rainy days were occupied with familial sliding competitions, where thick socks were worn and we competed to see who could skid the furthest on the long, polished wooden floors. So long as you knew your way around, a friendly face was easy to find, and everything had its place.

Then she died, and with it the elusive fairy tale magic of the building. The numerous rooms became paradoxically claustrophobic, as each one seemed emptier than the last. Wandering the halls became a forlorn and miserable act, normally driven by the goal of finding solace from the depressive atmosphere that began to fester in the house. Instead, the sense of isolation only grew stronger.