Mind the gap

The fat woman in the corner heaved her gaze across the room; eyes like winter sun. Trucks groaned in gravel outside, rattling the thin office windows.

With a bored meticulousness, Phil rolled her lunch wrapper and flicked it at the rusting bin. She missed, and launched the cellophane missile into the fat woman's tea. Shoulders hunched, Phil scurried over and scooped it out. 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 Eighties with thick casing and a whir that put fridges to shame.

Sun shone sparsely through gaps in the blinds and dark littered the floor. Phil had worked at A.T.F. Constructions logging data and transactions for two years.

She was almost entirely deaf and had never heard the rhythmic rise and fall of the fat woman's breath - but she felt it: each inhalation, exhalation, pinned Phil like rocks to her chair.

Outside there was rising noise, the workers in the yard were bantering. One man winked at Phil.

'Oi - oi!' he shouted.

Beautiful, thin, like a sparrow, Phil smiled shyly. She didn't know this man. He was new to the job. He was not the man she thought of when she was alone: that was Michael.

Michael was a foreman at the construction yard and Phil had known him for nearly two years. He came into the office every fortnight. Phil wished it were 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. She clung to the future: what it might hold.

Michael was full of chat and warmth and he always took the time to listen. Phil would talk carefully, slowly, her eyes radiant. It was an effort for most people to understand the hoarse words that came deep from the back of her throat; most people did not listen because they had no patience.

Michael had patience. He ruffled her hair when he said hello and they would exchange knowing glances about the fat woman in the corner. He would smile like he understood her and his eyes followed her lips as she spoke.

Phil 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
rejection letters.

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 and dance without a care in the world. She wanted people to smile when she spoke; anyone, it didn't matter. 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.

The fat woman jerked her head at the noise in the corridor - it was Michael. He threw his tool bag down as he bounded into the room. Phil clamped her hands under her chair to hide her shakes.

She dreaded it when Michael asked her to go for 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 it was the end of winter and he had driven her down to the lake. They sat in the car admiring the interwoven sheets of ice. 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 anything about her life. But Phil did trust Michael. 'I might even love him', she thought, but then she wasn't sure what love was.

She was twenty-three years old and she did not know what love was. She did not know what sex was. She imagined Michael's wife, whether they made love, and if she 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 was not sure.

"Love-love, or just love?" asked Michael.

"Love-love. Sexual love."

"I don't know, I guess it means, Michael stared at the steering wheel, "wanting someone, all of them, needing them. Making each other feel warm. God, that sounds so shit. What I mean is, when being with them is just.." He trailed off.

"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 did not want to hear. Needless: as he didn't answer.

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

The sleet was pouring 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 picked at the winter cracks in her hands and thought how they looked like little red salmons swimming in her palms.

Michael gently pulled her to his lap and wove his hands through her hair - in, out, in, out.

"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 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, like her bones were 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 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 with sleet.

*

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.

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

Each day Phil looked more ethereal, like a soft and 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.

*

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 pushed 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 had driven down to the lake several times now but he did not attempt to make love to her. One night, they lay on a blanket on the ice with every part of their skin touching one another. His hands, his hands, gripped her white body. He held her like she might crumble; light enough not to break her, tight enough to hold her together.

*

Spastic. Dumb-arse. Mute. She had heard them all. But she'd never heard Deafo, maybe that's because they did not know she was deaf. She was just stupid or weird and that was that. So many times she had sat down and written pages of rebukes because she literally could not speak up. The corners of her words jarred with the air, her tone not in tune.

For a 'dumb-arse' she'd done well at school with straight A's all the way. She could have got a scholarship to learn abroad but her mother said that if she left the house she would not be allowed back. If Phil went out for a few hours she would be chastised. "No wonder you're deaf, her mother would say, "look at 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.

*

"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'll be down soon."

Michael had not been down to the yard for a month but the last time he had seen Phil he'd told her he loved her. When he dropped Phil home that evening, she was happier than she had 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 glowing body and the youth that sprang from her dark eyes.

Phil typed in the bookings and thought about how she could make Michael truly hers. It would not take much, she thought. Michael had said often that he froze when his wife stroked him at night. Phil smiled briefly; the heavy umbra was lifting and her pain would soon be assuaged. The fat lady drew the blinds. The gaps closed.

*

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

Where is Michael? What have I done wrong? The questions crawled unctuously around her stomach.

She held her hair back and vomited en-route to the toilet. She thought of the times they had laid on the blanket - his hands in her hair - and the last time when he had tried to make love to her and she had resisted. Then she let him.

Michael undid her trousers and the pain made her scrape her nails through the dirt. He had said 'I love you for the far away place you're in.'

Was she far away? She could not stop the water from sliding down her face as she curled up on the floor, her knees touching her chin.

*
It was no wonder that Michael had not come back yet, I will have to get more sexual experience, make myself more desirable, more fluent, Phil thought. There were plenty of men who were willing to assist her in her quest; it was only when she spoke with her heavy breath that their eyes would become puzzled. And so the numerous, and silent, encounters began.

Phil started to love sex because 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 slats in the blinds.

While she was waiting for Michael to return she imagined an emotional union where they would have passionate sex at the lake. She would be a carnal impresario.

He would smell her hair, unable to tear his eyes from her face. She would 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, the more they began to look strangely vulnerable.

The woman has never been unkind to me, Phil thought. In fact, she has always let me just be. I wonder if she has 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 has ever loved someone so much it makes her feel sick; if she has tried to smother her face between her rolls of fat, tears mixing with her 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 had got like that - like chaffed sausages. She wore no wedding ring.

*

Week after week Phil found herself in the back of a new 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 did not say much.

It was usual for the men to meet her at the yard after work and not say a word - they would simply have sex with her and leave. Eventually Phil's stomach began to ache so much that she had to stop; she could not touch their oily hair and clothes without needing to be sick.

One evening she sat in the back of the yard smelling the last man's sweat on her fingers, her sob echoed off the sky onto 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 stood up, her legs buckled, she was unsure how to stand: it was as if she had forgotten everything. She felt the deep holes in her face, the dents of the gravel - she was full of holes.

The walk home took longer than usual; spring birds and the sound of hairdryers in bedrooms where people woke up with their spouses cut the morning silence. Phil's first stop was Burger King.

At home, she carefully opened 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.