Just Give Me a Sign

by Sam Szanto

At first, Dev visited in the morning. But there were too many people at that time. Getting it over with so they could get on with their days, the heavy bag of duty slung off their shoulders. Probably an uncharitable thought, but so what?

Now Dev went at dusk, the yawn of the day. Twilight had been Gaynor’s favourite time. They had often met after work to walk home as the sun set. He hadn’t minded what time of day it was, as long as they were together, but now he appreciated how the dim light smudged reality.

Dev visited Gaynor through freeze and blossom, never quite planning it, the way you never plan to wake up in the morning. He brought things: teddy bears, balloons, flowers, candles. Chocolates, once, but they were stolen. He brought his dreams and his stories, his memories. His past and their past.

He sat on the same bench, facing her patch of grass. No headstone yet. Gaynor’s family couldn’t agree on the wording. Her mum had asked what Dev thought, but he didn’t know either. How could a pithy one-liner summarise all she was? The only such epitaph that he thought would work well – ‘To the world you are one person, but to one person you are the world’ – had already been used for Alexander Litvinenko.

He sat as amber was replaced by navy, until he was at risk of being locked in. He sat as new graves were dug and new headstones put up. He sat when the trees carried snow like luggage and branches snapped under the weight. Dev cried so much it felt as if the tears had soaked into his skin.

Around him, things changed. The paths were redone by the council, and a heady smell of tar filled the air. A nearby school built with RAAC concrete was forced to close, and it was quieter without the teenagers on the road of tired shops that ran alongside the cemetery.

Through it all, Dev sat and talked to Gaynor. Time rolled out like dough, never to become bread.

In May, Dev’s parents came to see him. They tried to persuade him to go back up north with them. “You can be a teacher anywhere,” they said. They couldn’t understand why he would pay exorbitant rent to live in a tiny one-bed apartment when there was nothing… now that she’d… Unfinished, well-meaning sentences. He couldn’t explain that sometimes a person is born far from home. As soon as he’d come to London, he’d met Gaynor, and both things had made him feel this was his place; he loved its immense confusing giddiness.

His parents went home, promising to call and Zoom, to be back soon.

Their visit made Dev later to the cemetery than usual. As he approached, carrying a bouquet of orchids and white roses, he saw someone on his bench. An elderly lady wearing a Barbie-pink coat. Holding a pink handbag as if it contained family heirlooms. Was she a relative? He didn’t recognise her, but hadn’t been in a fit state at the funeral to register everyone who was there.

Not wanting to sit and make small talk – or big talk – Dev walked around the graveyard, hoping she’d soon leave. A curlew gave a smooth, haunting whoop. The magnolias were budding, a sign that spring was coming.

Dev studied the older graves with the tawny-colored tombstones covered with moss and ivy. The sightless angels and sleeping lions protecting them. There were many splendid graves, as this was one of London’s Magnificent Seven, containing mausoleums and the catacombs; even a derelict stone chapel. There were famous poets and playwrights, musicians and engineers, buried there. He read the inscriptions for the families. The pious platitudes and simple statements. There were many couples reunited in death. One married pair was born on the same day and died on the same day: An accident or had one heart stopped in grief as soon as the other’s was stopped by disease?

He wrapped his arms around himself, the breeze whispering on his face. It had been a warm day, sunbathers in the small park near his office. Sun was the enemy of grief, he thought. He wanted the winter back. But now, in the dying of the day, in this place of the dead, the sun was just an ordinary star.

Once Dev had done a slow circuit, the woman had gone. He laid down his flowers and described his parents’ visit to Gaynor.

‘They send their love,’ he said, although it wasn’t true. They had loved her, but that wasn’t a phrase they would use now. Only Dev spoke of her, and to her, in the present tense.

A week later, the elderly woman was there again. Wearing the pink coat, holding the pink bag. She turned at Dev’s approach and he had the nonsensical feeling that she had been waiting for him. She was older than he’d realised from his first glance: in her late seventies or early eighties. Curly hair, skin as pale and delicate as tissue paper.

‘Hello, dear,’ she said, patting the space beside her.

Dev sat, smelling cigarette smoke on her. In the sky, a full moon flickered. On Gaynor’s patch of grass, a wren shouted.

‘So you’re here for Gaynor.’ The woman’s accent was a soft Scottish.

Dev nodded.

‘You’re the fiancée.’

‘Yes.’ He wanted to ask who she was but felt he should know, as she knew him.

‘The bonniest baby, Gaynor,’ she said. ‘Those gorgeous curls.’

Dev smiled. ‘She was always straightening her hair.’

At least Gaynor hadn’t lost her curls. There hadn’t been time, the cancer had taken her so quickly. One morning she was doubled over in pain, six weeks later she was gone. No symptoms until it was too late. He had driven her to hospital in the morning, and she had never come home. The only thing the doctors could offer was palliative care in a hospice.

‘We ironed our hair, in my day,’ the woman said.

This seemed to require no answer. Dev stared at the graves. He knew them – those in his eye line and those not – as he had known textbooks while revising for his finals. The recurring family names and professions. The recent ones with photos propped against them. The children’s corner with the teddies and balloons. The area where the headstones were falling over, and trying to reach them meant getting tangled in vines and roots.

‘When my husband died, I thought I’d never get past it,’ she said. ‘It was like being in a maze, blindfolded.’

‘Did you get out?’ Dev asked, through the constriction in his throat.

‘No. But I got to take my blindfold off, and every turn I took that I’d thought was a dead end led to another memory.’

He nodded.

‘She loves you very much,’ the woman said.

Dev didn’t go to the cemetery the next day. He had been watching ‘Stranger Things’, their favourite show, and talking to Gaynor about what was happening. Then he realised it was eight o’clock, and the gates would be locked.

‘Sorry, Gay,’ Dev said.

 The next day, the woman was on the bench again. As well as her Barbie-pink coat and pink bag she wore a pink hat, the curls that were neither blonde nor grey grinning from beneath it. She smelled again of cigarettes and Dev thought of asking for one, although he hadn’t smoked since his twenties.

He lay down a bunch of sweet violets and sat beside her. In the nearest tree, starlings jabbered excitedly as children. Redwings sat in another, their chatter more muted, as if they were an older class.

‘I’m glad you came,’ she said.

‘It’s my favourite place,’ Dev said. ‘Does that sound weird?’

She gave a hacking cough.

‘It was how I felt when my husband died,’ she said.

They watched a young family; a baby in a pram, fists fighting the air, a young boy on a bright yellow scooter. Gaynor had wanted children. Dev felt anger as a bolus in his throat.

‘She would have made a lovely mother.’ The old lady coughed again. ‘Played so gently with her dolls, did Gaynor.’

Here was someone who had memories beyond his own. It felt like a gift.

‘Did she?’ he said. ‘What else do you remember about her?’

‘Well, she loved coming to cemeteries. There was a lovely one near my house. She called it a stony park. She loved looking at the graves and making up stories of the people under the ground. She was never scared by the idea of dead people as some little children would have been.’

He smiled and could imagine Gaynor smiling too.

‘Can you tell me more about her?’ he asked. ‘As she was as a child, I mean.’

‘Another time,’ she said, gripping her handbag as she slowly got to her feet. He had another waft of cigarette smoke. ‘You take care now, love.’

In August, it was the anniversary of the day Dev had proposed to Gaynor. A day that only he remembered. He had joined a bereavement support group that met weekly, but on the anniversary, he went to the graveyard rather than the meeting. Before that, he had listened to the voice messages from Gaynor on his phone. Her voice drifted into the still air of their kitchen like wisps of ethereal smoke. Dev listened to the messages for days. In their bed, he listened to the bland ones asking him to leave the porch door open for a delivery, to the sweet ones saying she missed him when she was on a work trip. The grief wrapped him again in its white envelope. He felt utterly passive as if his life were a book he was reading. He didn’t go to the bereavement group the next week, although he knew he should have. He felt he wouldn’t be able to speak; the grief stuck in his throat.

It hadn’t been like this before the anniversary. He had even arranged to have coffee with Jane, a woman from the group who had lost her husband a year ago. It wasn’t exactly a romantic date but he should – he would – cancel, it wasn’t fair on her. Who ‘her’ was in this case, he wasn’t sure.

Stepping back into the graveyard felt like a homecoming. In the twilight, the outlines of trees were sketchy softenings, blackthorn blossoms impressionistic sprays. He patted a tawny tombstone, the name of the person made illegible by years of strong winds. Over the rumble of buses and the clatter of a drill from somewhere unknown, the air was thick with birdsong.

She was on the bench. Dev had known she would be, although he hadn’t seen her since the time she’d told him about coming to cemeteries with Gaynor. It had felt like another loss, not seeing her.

Although it was a warm day, she was wearing the pink coat. Probably older people got colder than younger ones.

‘They’re putting up the headstone next week,’ Dev said, after putting down a bunch of sunflowers. They went well with the splashily bright wildflowers. ‘Just a name, no dates. Her mum thought that said it all.’

Then he thought, she probably already knows if she’s a family member. If she did, she gave no sign of it.

‘Unusual ideas, Madeleine,’ the woman said, and he laughed. He didn’t disagree, Gaynor’s mum did have unusual ideas, although he’d liked the idea of the minimal wording. He thought Gaynor would have too.

Birds’ agitated muttering filled the silence. A great tit’s adamant two-note chirrup.

‘I never got over losing my Keith,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I wished he would haunt me; just so I knew he was still there, watching me. He never did. Never believed in ghosts, Keith.’

Dev had felt the same. ‘Just give me a sign,’ he had shouted. She never had, although Gaynor had believed in ghosts.

‘There was always a stone in my heart,’ the woman said. ‘But I learned to live with it, and sometimes it was so small I forgot it was there. It will be the same for you.’

The warm air shivered. Something she had said was strange, but Dev couldn’t put his finger on it.

‘Go on your date,’ she said. ‘Gaynor wants you to.’

She patted him on the shoulder, and stood, coughing again. She ought to give up smoking, thought Dev.

Watching her go, he realised what was strange about what she had said. She had spoken about herself into the past tense and Gaynor in the present tense. Of course, she was old, maybe not entirely compos mentis.

Then Dev remembered something else she’d said: Go on your date. But he hadn’t mentioned a date. Had told Jane he wasn’t ready just yet. The world shifted slightly, felt fainter, as if he were looking through a veil. Perhaps he had mentioned the date. Grief did strange things to your brain, making you a tourist in it, a tourist in another time constantly visiting the same said and unsaid monuments and ruins. It had made him slightly crazy, he realised, the submarine nature of grief. The unbelonging of it. Many times since losing Gaynor, he had forgotten or misremembered things: perhaps he had misremembered the whole conversation with the pink-coated lady. A stranger who felt less like a stranger than his best friends, although they had only met three times. Presumably, he would see her when Gaynor’s headstone was put up, and he could ask her then whether he had heard her right, and if so what it meant.

Dev watched a leaf spiral from a tree, picturing Gaynor trying to catch falling leaves; she believed if she caught one, she would have a lucky month.

After visiting the new headstone with Gaynor’s family, during which time the rain fell gently and steadily, they went to her parents’ house. It was a Victorian terrace, which Gaynor had said was small when she was young, but had been enlarged over the years with loft, rear, and side extensions. The last time Dev had been inside was at the wake.

Now, as then, a buffet was laid out in the kitchen-diner. Images of Gaynor, interspersed with photos of her two sisters who looked like her, were everywhere. School photos, a plate with her baby handprint stamped on it, their engagement photo.

Now, as then, everyone was kind and solicitous to Dev. They asked how he was as if they cared; probably, they did. Still, he had the feeling that even though he would keep in touch, this would be the last time he came to the house. He was liminal, had not quite made it into their world. A child would have been a connection, even a wedding. But there was nothing except a ring, and he still had that. Maybe he should give it to Gaynor’s mother.

During the buffet, Dev was approached by Gaynor’s eighty-two-year-old grandmother, Morgana. One hand was on her walker, another held a plate containing one sandwich. Dev greeted her warmly. Gaynor had been very fond of Morgana; they had visited her together. Morgana seemed physically and mentally diminished by Gaynor’s death, talking in rambling loops, the sandwich trembling on the plate. During a pause in her speech, Dev mentioned the woman on the bench.

‘A pink coat? A friend of Gay’s?’ Morgana frowned.

‘She seemed to have known her as a child,’ Dev said. ‘I assumed she was a relative – your sister, maybe.’

He hadn’t thought this at the time, but he realised now that she did have a look of Morgana. Both had curly hair and Roman noses. Watching Madeleine restock the plates with sandwiches and cakes, Dev recognised them as family traits. Gaynor’s nose wasn’t quite like theirs, her curls wilder and blonder, but there was a similarity.

‘I don’t have a sister.’ Morgana sounded affronted, as if having a sister was a petty crime, like vandalism or trespassing.

‘Family friend?’

‘I don’t have many friends left.’

‘She has a Scottish accent,’ Dev persisted. ‘I think she knew Gay when she was little.’

He remembered another detail.

‘She said Gaynor called cemeteries stony parks.’

‘Stony parks?’

‘Maybe I’ve got it wrong.’ Dev didn’t like the expression on her face.

‘My mother used to take Gaynor to cemeteries,’ Morgana said. ‘Mum looked after her when neither Madeleine nor I could: I still worked when she was little, before she started school. She did call them stony parks.’

‘But still—’

‘Mum came to London from Scotland as a teenager; never lost the accent. And pink was her favourite colour.’

‘But your mother….’ Dev didn’t know where the sentence was going. Fragments of thoughts swirled in his head, a kaleidoscope forming and reforming.

‘My mother died when Gaynor was five,’ Morgana said.

They looked at each other.

‘What did she die of?’ Dev asked.

‘Lung cancer. Smoked like a chimney, my mum.’

BIO: Sam Szanto lives in Durham, UK. Her debut short story collection ‘If No One Speaks’ was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2022. Her collaborative poetry pamphlet, ‘Splashing Pink’, was published by Hedgehog Press in 2023. Her poetry pamphlet ‘This Was Your Mother’ was published in 2024 by Dreich Press. Over 100 of her stories and poems have been published/ listed in competitions. In 2023, her novel ‘My Daughter’ was longlisted for both the Yeovil Prize and the Louise Walters Page 11 Competition. She won the Mum Life Stories Microfiction Contest and the Shooter Flash Fiction Contest. Social media handles are: X sam_szanto, Instagram samszantowriter, website samszanto.com.