First Footer

Cassie had never been pretty, not in the conventional button-nosed, lip pouting, hands in your lap kind of way. At almost six feet tall, she might have been called imposing or statuesque, but Cassie wasn’t even labelled those. At eighteen, her feet were the same size as her brother’s, she would slip on his work boots by the back door to collect firewood at the outhouse. She was rarely asked to dance of an evening out, no man wanted a woman to look up to.

But then she met him, the summer of ’56, and he had thought her pretty and she had known he was handsome.

He didn’t speak to her for some time, nor did he speak to anyone else on the ward. He read books and slept, smiled occasionally when she updated the chart at end of his bed, asked for his pillows to be plumped. In those days, one stayed at hospal for longer after an appendectomy, and on day four, when she was told to get him up and walking, check his mobility before discharge, she discovered that, even with his slightly stooped, convalescing frame, he was taller than her. That’s when they got talking. He made for the main door, said he needed fresh air, asked if she would she walk him to the garden. They sat by the herb garden – it came back to her now, the scent of rosemary – and he told her she looked like Maria Callas. She didn’t know who Maria Callas was, but she knew it was a good thing, the way he had said it.

‘Opera singer,’ the nursing sister had told her when she asked. ‘Sings foreign.’

‘And is she pretty?’ Cassie asked.

The nursing sister chewed her lip, raised an eyebrow, then folded her arms. ‘After a fashion.’ That’s what she’d said. ‘She looks a little like you, come to think of it. A big girl, long horsey face. Like one of those girls Picasso would paint. Nose, mouth, eyes, all oversized. She can sing though.’

Fred didn’t hang around, popped the question within three months, and she said she yes, for at twenty-five, she was getting on too.

For their first anniversary he bought her a radio and they sat up that night, lamps lit, listening to a Maria Callas concert from Athens. Oh mio babbino caro: how could that voice be human?

There had been fifteen more anniversaries, only fifteen, he died of a bad stomach, they didn’t use the ‘c’ word back then. Now it was Cassie’s turn, half a century later, she and her bad lung. And the bad lung had moved to other parts.

Nurses came every day – thank God she could stay at home – the drugs were amazing, took the pain away. At this age, Cassie was not at all afraid of dying, she was afraid only of pain. The last nurse had been in at 8pm. Brisk and bouncy Drew – they called young girls anything at all these days – Drew had enough energy for two. How was it, Cassie though, that for all the new-fangled inventions and advancements of the age, they had yet to work out how to syphon off excess energy from the young and give it to the old.

‘Just four hours and we’ll be ringing in New Year,’ Drew said as she hovered at the door, looking around to see if there was anything she had missed.

‘We will indeed, dear, we will indeed. Away you go and enjoy yourself. You’ve done well by me. Thank you, dear.’

‘I’ll not wish you a Happy New Year until tomorrow. You should fall asleep soon. I’ll be back before light. I’ll be your first footer. Goodnight.’

Cassie listened to the car engine starting up and fading away as the girl drove off. She didn’t drop off, but lay with her thoughts, folding another year behind her.

Towards midnight, she began to feel cold, first her hands and then feet. Soon her breathing became lighter, and she wondered, as she titled her chin to look down on her chest, if she was breathing at all. Then, despite the blanket having fallen from her bed, she felt warm, a tingling glow. The bells from the local church rang out and a knock came to the door.

‘Come on in,’ she called.

There it was, that unmistakable sound, the click of his heels on the floor, the noise from the mental tips, the ones men don’t have these days.

‘Fred,’ she said, and she thought she could hear the strains of Maria Callas singing an aria as she turned her head to the door.