Gap:

The fat woman in the corner breathed in-out - eyes grey as winter
sun. Outside, trucks groaned in gravel, rattling the thin office
windows. With a bored meticulousness, Phil rolled her lunch wrapper
into a small ball - she flicked it carefully at the rusting bin.

The fat woman heaved her eyes across the room like slugs.

Phil scurried over. Shoulders bent forward, she removed the cellophane
ball from the fat woman's tea. They said nothing. The woman rolled her
glare back to the computer monitor - if you could call it that - it was
a throwback from the Sixties, with thick plastic casing and a whir that
put fridges to shame.

Phil had worked at AT Constructions for almost two years, logging data
and transactions. Sun shone sparsely through gaps in the blinds, and
dark littered the floor; Phil was almost entirely deaf, she never heard
the rhythmic rise and fall of the fat woman's breath, but she felt it.
In her arms, her legs, her cheeks. Each breath pinned her like rocks to
the chair.

Mostly Phil thought of nothing but simply not being in the room. The
fat woman got up to get a KitKat - she unwrapped it slowly, but ate it
quickly. Phil looked on as she chewed the chocolate like most people
chew pork.

Outside there was rising noise, the workers in the Yard were bantering.
One man winked at Phil:
'Oi-oi!' he said.
Beautiful, thin, like a sparrow - she smiled shyly; she didn't know
this man, he was new to the job. He wasn't the man she thought of when
she was alone. That was Michael.

He had been a foreman at AT Constructions for ten years, and Phil had
known him for nearly two. He came into the office every fortnight. Phil
wished it was more. When she saw him, she felt light; as if she might
fall over; she had never had a boyfriend, only when she closed her eyes
and saw his shadow beneath her lids; her heart soft, expectant. The
future. What it might hold.

He was an effusive man; full of chat and warmth. He took the time to
listen. It took time to hear Phil, the hoarse strained words that came
deep from the back of her throat. She would talk carefully, slowly, her
eyes radiant. People often could not understand Phil, simply because
they did not have the patience. Michael had patience. He ruffled her
hair in a matey-way when he came in to say hello and they'd exchange
knowing glances about the fat woman in the corner. He'd smile like he
understood her, his eyes glued to her lips as she spoke.

Phil had moved to an apartment nearby two years ago. She had spent the
months between university and employment lying on her bed applying for
jobs. Nursing, housekeeping, accounts, factory work. She would smoke
cigarettes as she read the continuous rejection letters. Her hands
shaking with anticipation, despondency. Phil wanted so many things so
much that her body would physically tighten...

She wanted to hear. She wanted to be normal. She wanted apply her
make-up with the girls, dance without a care in the world. For people
to smile when she spoke. She wanted to laugh so hard her stomach hurt.
She wanted a man to love her so much, hold her so hard that it would
hurt.
Phil tapped lightly, methodically, at the keyboard - the green figures
welding her eyes; the sun bleaching the white of her sparrow
hands.

The fat woman jerked her head at the noise in the corridor; it was
Michael - he bounded into the room, throwing his tool bags by the door.
He nodded at the fat woman.

Phil felt her hands begin to shake, so she clamped them underneath her
chair. She dreaded it when Michael asked her to go for a coffee, she
would struggle to keep the liquid in the cup, spilling it over herself.
She wanted him so much that much her body gave her away. And perhaps
her nervousness was sweet?

Last month, he had driven her down to the Lake, it was the end of
winter. She shivered as Michael tried to adjust the car's heating. They
sat in the car admiring the frozen interwoven sheets of water. Michael
told her stories of stories he heard: but when it was her turn to speak
sometimes she found she couldn't. What would she tell him?

"Tell me something." he said.
Phil wrung her hands - they were baked from the dry of the car's fan
heater. She had never told anyone, anywhere, anything about her life.
She preferred to ask questions and listen.
But Phil did trust Michael. She thought she might even love him; but
then she wasn't sure what love was. She was twenty-three years old and
she didn't know what love was. Didn't know what sex was. She imagined
Michael's wife, and whether they made love, if Michael's wife knew how
to please him and do the right things.

"What does love mean to you?" Phil asked. Her hands were shaking, from
the cold or the nerves, she wasn't sure.
"Love-love, or just love?" asked Michael.
"Love-love. Sexual love."
"I don't know, I guess it means," Michael looked intently at the
steering wheel, "wanting someone, all of them. Needing them. Making
each other warm. God, that sounds so shit.
I mean, when being with them is just..."
" Do you love-love your wife?"
He breathed in with his lip between his teeth.
"I did."
"Did? OK. And now?"
She closed her eyes intermittently: so that the darkness might shield
her from anything she didn't want to hear. Needless, because he didn't
answer.

Phil opened her eyes to see Michael crying. She'd never seen anyone cry
quite like that - each drop was heavy and perfectly formed, creeping
down from wide-open eyes. He didn't blink or attempt to wipe the
water.

The sleet was raining down, she couldn't hear it but she could feel it;
Phil could always tell what the weather was like - without even opening
her eyes. She turned look at Michael and his strange bottomless
expression, the tears were still there, dropping carefully. Phil wrung
her hands tighter, she didn't know what to do.

Twenty minutes had passed since they'd last spoken. He pulled her head
to his lap, she laid there as he wove his hands in and out of her
hair.

"Soft." He whispered.
Phil didn't hear, of course, but then she was already in another place.
Her heart was beating deep, like baseball bat on the inside of her
skull. Phil could hear - it's just she heard different things to most
people. Inner stirrings: like leaves falling, blood journeying around
the body, the shutting of eyelids.

Michael probed her more about her days in England. And about her
father. But she closed up, her bones shrinking. Her memories of her
father were hazy, she only remembered the shouting. She remembered
being told to listen harder. That she was difficult. That she should
speak up.

Phil picked up her head, shook her hair and stared at the folds of ice
on the lake. She thought of her life as a series of moments, Each
moment was like a block of ice.
At once cold and melted as she thought of it.

They drove back home, windscreen wipers screeching in the sleeting
rain.

*

Phil felt the skin on her face - it was papery from the heater in
Michael's car. She reached under her bed for the remnants of last
night's cigarettes and placed a cold Marlboro light between her lips.
Brilliant sun shone into the room, her dark hair sprawled across the
gold pillow rays.

She thought of how she would get Michael, and make him wholly hers.
They would love one another in a way that redeemed everything - shine a
white ray onto the past, and make it neat.

Phil rose from her disheveled room looking immaculate. Each day she
looked almost ethereal; a soft, evanescent sparrow. Her white fingers
never seemed to catch the yellow of her cigarettes - just like her
words never seemed to catch the air in the way that voice usually does:
Phil often felt unreal in a world of real things.

She felt caught in the gap, lodged between inner and outer. Inner: a
world she didn't fully understand, it was harder to breathe there. And
outer - where the stares as she spoke jarred her.

She pulled a brush through her hair and meandered out of the
door.

*

The next time Michael took her to the lake he kissed her. Phil felt
exhilarated - she imagined they were not in the sleet in the darkness,
but in a huge buttercup field where the sticky smell was overwhelming
and the sun stung her neck.
Michael leaned the car seat back as far as it would go.
"Phil" Michael urged.
"Phil?" He repeated.
"Yes" She could hardly breathe.
He paused: "I love this."

She couldn't stop smiling. So this is what it felt like to get what you
want. This. Love-love in the dark.

They'd driven down to the lake several times now, but he'd hadn't
attempted to have sex with her. They'd just laid with the seats right
back. One night, they took a blanket out onto the ice and they laid
there, every part of skin touching one another. His hands, his hands,
gripped her white body.

Michael found being with Phil pleasant - a much younger girl - it was a
fleeting, flattering, and innocuous enough, escape from his wife. He
soaked up the sparrow flitter of her eyes and the whiteness of her
skin.

*

Thicko. Spastic. Dumb-ass. Mute. She'd heard them all. But she'd never
heard Deafo - maybe that's because they didn't think she was deaf. She
was just stupid or weird - and that was that. So many times she'd sat
down and written pages of rebukes and rebuffs and comebacks. Pages and
pages, because she literally couldn't speak up - the corners of her
words jarred with the air, her tone not in tune.

For a Thicko, she'd done well at school - straight A's all the way. She
could have got a scholarship to do a Masters but her mother said that
if she left the house, she wouldn't be allowed back. If Phil 1went out
for a few hours she'd be castigated: "No wonder you're deaf," her
mother would say, "look how you treat your mother."

Phil recalled the exhilaration she felt when she slept in her new flat,
on her own, for the first time.
She waved her arms around in the dark - feeling the freedom with her
palms. She hadn't been able to sleep all night with excitement, life
felt plastic and shiny and new.
She hadn't anticipated the policeman knocking at the door.
"Is this your mother's necklace?" he said, the metal of his badge
reflecting on his teeth.
Phil's knees crumpled to the floor: She knew her mother was dead - she
sensed things, she knew straight away. She'd taken too many
painkillers. Too much pain.

*

"Michael, what's the matter?" Phil asked. Her thin wrists were
trembling.
"Nothing Phil, it's just I've been super-busy. I've been called out
night and day. It's nothing to do with you, Sweet. I've just been tied
up. I'll be down soon."
Michael hadn't been down to the yard for a month - but the last time
he'd seen Phil he'd told her he loved her. When he dropped Phil home
that evening, she was happier than she'd been in her whole life. Even
her skin felt new. Like she could live in it again.

Phil put down the text phone. The fat woman breathed slowly, in-out, in
the corner. Phil watched her eat another Mars bar. The fat woman stared
back at her, envious of her lithe and glowing body - the youth that
sprang from her dark eyes.

As Phil typed in the bookings, she thought again about how she could
make Michael truly hers. It wouldn't take much - he didn't touch his
wife anymore; he'd told Phil how he froze when his wife tried to stroke
him at night. Phil smiled: the pain she'd assumed was unassuagable
wasn't; the heavy umbra was lifting. The fat lady drew the
blinds.

*

Another month passed, still no appearance from Michael. Phil had thrown
herself into a keep-fit routine, two hundred sit-ups a day, and a
grueling yoga video routine. She watched the television set closely,
copying the shapes the instructor made.

Where is Michael? What have I done wrong? The questions crawled
unctuously around her stomach - she felt sick. Running to the bathroom,
she held hair back as she vomited in a trail to the toilet.

She thought of the times they'd laid on the blanket - his hands in her
hair - and the last time, when he'd tried to make love to her, and she
had resisted. Then she let him. After Michael had undone her trousers,
the pain made her scrape her nails through the dirt; then they got back
into the car and drove home.

He'd said: I love you for the far away place you're in. Was she far
away? She couldn't stop the water from sliding down her face - as she
curled up on the floor, her knees touched her chin.

*

It was no wonder Michael hadn't come back yet, she thought, I'll have
to get more sexual experience; make myself more desirable, more fluent,
less stupid. And there were plenty of men who were willing to oblige -
it was only when she spoke with her heavy breath that their eyes would
get that puzzled look. And so the random, silent, and numerous,
encounters began. Phil started to love sex, it was an escape from the
inner and the outer. When she came she found herself brilliantly
suspended between the two worlds - like the light that shone vividly
between the gaps in the blinds.

All the while she was waiting for Michael to return - she imagined an
emotional union, where they'd have passionate sex at the Lake. She'd be
carnal impresario. They'd be crying and he'd be smelling her hair,
unable to tear his eyes from her face. She'd be like a waterfall - the
universe falling all over her at once.

*

Phil watched the fat woman lick her lips. Her eyes were not grey today,
but browner, like iron ore or copper. She wondered if the woman had
always been fat. The more Phil looked at the woman's eyes today, the
more they began to look strangely vulnerable, but something made them
not beautiful.

The woman has never been unkind to me, Phil thought, in fact, she has
let me just be. I wonder if she's ever found herself looking at the sky
and wondering how it all fits together; if she's ever felt like all the
colours in the world are strangely fake - too bright and don't make
sense; if she's ever loved someone so much it makes her feel sick; if
she's ever tried to smother her face between the rolls of fat, tears
mixing with sweat.

She had sat opposite the woman for two years, and all she knew was her
name: Celia Dell. With waspish grey-black hair, and a sagging neck, the
woman looked about fifty years old. Her lips were thin, and when she
licked them she wet her chin. Her hands were red and shredded - Phil
wondered how they'd got like that - like chaffed sausages. She wore no
wedding ring.

*

Week after week Phil found herself in the back of a new van or lorry,
sometimes even in the Yard.
As the hands rooted underneath her clothes, she closed her eyes and
imagined it was Michael - how she would hold him when he came back, how
she would take each part of his body and shower it with new-found
skill. The men in the Yard never asked her questions like Michael did,
but they craved her body, her eagerness - the one with the funny voice,
she didn't say much. It was usual for them to meet her at the Yard
after work and not say a word - they would simply have sex with her and
leave.
Phil's stomach began to ache so much that she eventually had to stop -
she couldn't touch their oily hair, and clothes, without
vomiting.

On the last evening, she sat in the back of the Yard, smelling the last
man's sweat on her fingers, she began to cry unasuaggebly - tears
merging with the grit and the gravel. Her pale voice echoed off the sky
and into the Yard's metal fences; a realisation: she couldn't live on
the inside, or the outside, and she couldn't have Michael. She laid her
head on the ground, the ends of her hair swallowed in a puddle.

In the early morning she rose to her feet, her legs buckling, unsure
how to stand: it was as if she had forgotten everything. She felt the
deep holes in her face, the unforbidding dents of the gravel - she was
full of holes. The walk home took longer than usual; the morning-break
silence was cut by spring birds and the sound of hairdryers in
bedrooms, where people woke up with their spouses. Phil's first stop
was Burger King.

At home on her bed, she carefully unwrapped the foil parcels. The first
burger melted into her mouth, but second was a little more
intransigent. The third calmed the fierce wallow of her stomach.

*

The larger she got, the more there was to hide in, each roomy fold was
extra diameter for the gap: a place to exist that was not on the inside
or the outside. The men didn't stop to turn anymore