Castaway ➳ cth [EDITING/HIATUS]

Chapter 5

*Calum's P.O.V*

It took me nearly a half hour to get home.

Although it took me that long, I literally ran every time to get there as fast as possible. Living with this permanent anxiety lead to serious paranoia, paired up with some symptoms of schizophrenia and non-existing sense of self-esteem.

The rain got worse and worse. As I lifted my head, I saw the dark clouds flying above me. But in the distance, the sun was peeking through the thick grey layer of clouds and I assumed the evening might get warmer and sunnier than the days before.

My feet carried me to the little suburb, located south from the psychology practice. My house was never the house I expected to live in. It was bigger than a regular one-family house, the front garden was probably several meters long - a wide entrance was wide enough for two cars to drive at the very same time.

The façade of the house was made of crème-coloured bricks and topped with dramatically sloped dark-blue roof. The windows, all covered by baby blue curtains from the inside, were all different shaped, which gave the house an old-looking style - but I wasn't complaining about it.

I knew my mother was waiting inside, probably practicing on her singing skills with my little sister. Or cooking something exotic as usual.

I opened the garden gate to walk through the other entrance, considerably narrower than the other one and hurried into the house, as the rain got heavier.

I barely opened the front door, when I heard my mum and my sister upstairs:

"Greensleeves was my delight, Greensleeves my heart of gold."

Another song by Loreena McKennitt. I never knew why my mum was teaching my sister those kind of old, boring songs.

"Mum?" I yelled.

The music stopped. "Cal?" I heard Miriam's voice. My sister peeked down, holding herself onto the railing.

"Hey", I muttered and walked upstairs to face her. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah", she whispered shyly, "I have to practice more on my vocals though. Just wanted to see who came in."

She turned around and walked back into her room. My mum didn't say anything, she looked out of the room straight into my eyes, but I didn't feel the urge to go up to her and say anything.

The only thing I wanted is to get into my room, close the door and crawl under the plain white bedsheets to rethink what mistakes I did in this entire day.

Due to the fact that I'm not open-minded to Miriam anymore, has to do with the relationship between my father and me. And the night everything changed.

To be sincere, my biological father used to abuse both of us, my sister and me. And it took us a long time to get out of his custody.

I remember the day my sister got delivered into the hospital in the middle of the night. The man we used to live with, I'm not able to say the word 'father' anymore, came home, drunk as hell that night.

And apparently he got angry at my sister for being up so late, she was just worried where he was, that was the reason she couldn't sleep. Out of anger, the man threw a plate at her face, and she passed out falling slowly, but I was right on time to catch her from behind.

She blacked out because of the shock.

I remember, I was just fourteen at the time and my sister was six. I had to carry her and while the man had no idea what was going on. His brain wasn't capable to catch the moment I was leaving with my unconscious sister and running to the only neighbour I knew.