Maisie

Do you know the expression 'that took the wind oot wur sails?'

A and I arrived at the library today for our fortnightly run. It used to be a weekly run but we've gone from 14 to 5 clients in the last couple of years so we've cut back our visits. The moment we walked into the library we were told that one of our clients had died.

That was Maisie.

It was a shock. We saw her two weeks ago and she wasn't well - too thin, A said, on antibiotics for an infection and her son had come up from England because he was worried about her. Looking back on that last visit, I realise that the son's knowing looks directed at A and me were a warning that Maisie was a lot more ill than we thought.

A has been delivering to the homebound in the south of Glasgow far longer than me, but I reckon I'd known Maisie for about 7 years. She loved reading. She liked a mixture of books. As soon as we worked out she was Andy Murray's biggest fan (that was easy: she had his picture up on the wall of her retirement flat), we started looking out for books about or by him. She also loved Tartan Noir, especially by women writers like Caro Ramsay, Lin Anderson and Denise Mina. Biographies and autobiographies also went down well with her.

Almost the first thing she told me about herself was that she'd been married twice. The first marriage, I gathered, was a disaster but in widowhood Maisie met the man she'd always dreamed of and married him and had a few years of real happiness before he, too, died. She wasn't a remarkable woman, our Maisie, just a decent wumman in the Glasgow style. Adored her sons and grandchildren. Had their photos all over her flat. Worried about them and just loved to see them when they came to visit which, I'm glad to say, they did regularly.

Today A and I sat in the car park of her sheltered housing complex and noticed that her flat was empty. As was the flat where Archie used to live. Archie was the client who died before Maisie.

It's happening too often. And although there is no family bond between us and our library clients, there's a terrible sense of loss.