Sunshine

I’m not a fucking savant. I can’t play the piano at an advanced level. Not that it would matter now, anyway. It shouldn’t matter, and yet it does. The whole fucking world imploded, but less than twenty seconds after speaking to me, they know what I am. They know what it means. Oh, look, an autistic kid! And then they want me to jump on command like some dancing monkey. Well, I hate to break it to you, but I suck at maths. I don’t know an isotope from a telescope, and I can’t even say hello in any language but my own. I haven’t been painting since birth, and I couldn't produce the faintest suggestion of a likeness if I attempted to draw something.

A fucking meteor took out the entire southern hemisphere, and I still have to say this shit.

It was easier when mum was still here. She handled this crap for me. She called them lemmings because one after the other, they walked right off that edge and into stupidity. Every time. We'd set timers on our watches to see how long it would take for the lightbulb to ping. Then she’d look at me, give me a wink, and that was my cue to get the fuck out of dodge. She’d handle it. It would have been easier if she’d died in the blast. Everyone lost something. Someone. Collective grief is, I’m told, surprisingly comforting. I didn’t lose anyone. Couldn’t. There was only ever mum and me, anyway. Well, there was dad, but he died a long time ago. Since then, it was just us.

On the day of the blast, we were visiting her old friends from uni in London. I didn’t want to go, but she said it would be good for me. First of all, you need to know that my mum only used that phrase in sparing quantities. Most of the time, she got me out of all kinds of things I didn’t want to do. Exams. Coursework. Actual work. So when she told me it would be good for me to go with her, I trusted her judgement. They have cool comic book shops in London, and every kind of food you can think of. She was right; it was good for me, even if I did have to endure ten rounds of “Oh, haven’t you grown!”

When the meteor hit, we were drinking coffee outside a cafe just up the road from the British Museum. We didn’t know then that it was a meteor; all we felt was the impact. I thought the whole street would collapse in on itself as the quake levelled buildings to the ground. The noise was unbearable. My mum grabbed me and we headed for the subway. I didn’t know if this was the right thing to do, but I reasoned that if subways can handle the weight of huge trucks travelling overhead, then they were probably safer than the street.

Seconds after we piled in there - an idea that most of London had shared, apparently - the lighting cut out and we stood, disorientated in the dark as the world collapsed around us. I reached out through the pitch black to feel for my mother; we’d gotten separated in the crowd during the panic. People were screaming, and the screeching sound of iron girders filled the air as they keeled over and collided with the ground. I couldn’t make out whose skin was my mothers, until I felt the locket around her neck, and latched on to her body with all my strength.

It was her mother’s locket before it was hers. An antique before that. My mum thought it was a macabre piece, shaped like an anatomical heart, but she said that it reminded her of me. Jewellery ought, she said, to be pretty. This thing was ugly as all hell. I was pragmatic, in spite of insufficient knowledge to claim rational superiority. With perfect pragmatism, I agreed. She wore that thing every minute of every day from the moment she realised that something about me wasn’t quite as it seemed.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see my mother mouthing words, but I couldn’t hear anything over the screeching crowd. When the rumbling slowed and they quieted, I heard her bellow LEMMINGS. I knew what to do. I grabbed onto her belt and followed her as she barged through the crowd like a snowplough, covered in the dirt and detritus of London’s oblivion. In the dark, she resembled a white bull: shiny from sweating, covered in ashy brick dust, and determined. At the centre of the subway was a door. She’d known about this place from her nights out on the lash during her uni days. To my disgust, she’d told me they nipped in there for a quick shag after last orders at the bar. The most disgusting place in the whole world now became my only source of refuge. She always said perspective was the most valuable skill.

With the door slammed shut behind us, the sound of the roaring crowd dulled enough that I felt I could breathe for the first time since the start of the quake. She grabbed me by the face with both hands, laying with softness her forehead against mine.

“Danny, baby, we’re going to be fine, but you need to do exactly as I say. You need to understand that we’re going to have to squeeze down some really tight spaces; you’re going to want to panic, but you can’t. I need you to hold that shit together until we get out of this, okay?”

I nodded with vigour in silence.

She grabbed my hand and pulled me down a narrow entryway, behind a series of now steaming pipes. The walls were so close together, I couldn’t even move my arms, and had to turn my head to the side. My mum turned hers towards me and sidestepped blind down the gap so that she could keep me calm. She sang to me as we inched deeper into the void.

You are my sunshine.

My only sunshine.

You keep me happy

When skies are grey.

She always sang that song to me when I got stressed. All I could think was that the world would collapse and we’d get stuck in this stupid wall, maybe even crushed to death. My mum snapped her fingers in front of me.

You’ll never know dear - stay with me, baby

How much I love you.

Please don’t take

My sunshine away.

“Okay, baby, we’re almost at the end now. Stay with me for a few more minutes.”

It felt like the longest minutes of my life. I was struggling to breathe because the plumes of dust from the carnage on the streets had started to creep under the door and down the passage. When we finally reached the end, I was shaking, panicking so hard that my nose was bleeding. She pulled me out and touched her forehead to mine. She called it “grounding”. I said I thought grounding was what happened when you took your dad’s credit card and spent it on booze. She laughed so hard. Either way, it worked.

When I looked back up the passage, I realised we’d been travelling downhill into what I presume was a service room. Mum sat me down on an old crate and checked me over for injuries. We drank water, got our bearings as best we could and exited the room through a hatch on the wall. We emerged into a network of tunnels I had no idea even existed. I’m not sure anyone but mum knew they existed. Perks of being stranded in a global crisis with an urban planning architect, I guess. When we finally found people, the quaking had stopped, and London had never felt so quiet. People stood motionless, covered in dust and blood, but their eyes scared me the most. I know a lot about eyes. You think I don’t look at them because that’s what the books say. Autistic people avoid eye contact. The keyword in that sentence is contact. I spend a lot of time looking at eyes. Those eyes were something else completely. I know my mum saw it too; that's why she started singing again. Those eyes are all I see now. Even when they give me the finger guns and ask rapid-fire sums at me. Still with the eyes. Dead inside. The southern hemisphere was completely eradicated, but the whole world died that day.

Our house had been levelled to the ground in the quake. If we’d been in it, we’d have been levelled with it. We only stayed in Leeds because that’s where dad lived, but he was dead, and the house was fucked, so they put us in temporary accommodation in London. By which I mean they gave us a bed in a multiple-occupancy tent, since that was all there was left. The whole world lingered in darkness as clouds of dust and ash filled the sky for months. Nobody went outside because breathing was impossible without access to the apparatus we no longer had. A few scavengers went out in search of anything that wasn’t completely destroyed, and we did begin to grow a collection of things. Few of them were any use to us at all without power.

She’d known for months but didn’t tell me. I get why she didn’t tell me after, either. The whole world was razed to the ground. Where the fuck would she go for chemotherapy now? Rebuilding the hospitals was a priority, but oncology was so far down the list. There was no way she’d have gotten the care she needed in time. It was stage four before the meteor hit. Metastatic. Terminal. She was already on borrowed time. All I have left now is that stupid fucking locket. The locket that reminds me I have no business trying to survive without her because she was the brains of this outfit. I was only ever the vessel with the confidence to say the shit that needed saying. Now I’m confidently stupid.

When they put her cot in the palliative care tent, they hooked her up to morphine. A nurse made it clear to me that they couldn’t do any more. The doctor told me he was sorry, probably for the hundredth time that day. I remember when doctors issued bad news like pain pills, entirely unscathed. You’d think, amidst all that death, they’d become desensitised to it. They don’t. They die over and over again, every day until, at the end of it all, there aren’t any pieces left of them to die.

A priest came to see her. She mouthed lemmings at me as he read passages from the bible. She took her last breath when the cloud of dust cleared enough that a ray of light fell over the camp. For a moment, she looked the healthiest she had in months. Her face lit up with the widest smile. And then, when the world was right again for only a second; when every hair on my body stood on end in anticipation of her recovery...

She took away my sunshine, and all that's left is grey.