Caracters Man, Secretary, Woman. The play takes place in a lost property office. A Man enters a lost property office and enquires after some space. The Secretary maintains that there isn’t any, but he insists on stay- ing. He tells her that he is a former vacuum-wrapped person; i.e. he took one breath when he was born and has been breathing out ever since – until recently. By measuring the amount of oxygen in the Man’s lungs, the doctors could work out the exact date and time at which he would run out of oxygen and die. All citizens have a per- sonal identity number, consisting of their birth date in 6 digits fol- lowed by a 4-digit number. The first 6 digits of Vacuum-wrapped people’s personal identity numbers are not their date of birth, but their date of death/sell-by date. The final 4 digits are the hour and minute at which death will occur. The phenomenon of vacuum-wrapped people has occurred because some people take up a lot of room, so others have to wrap them- selves up and breathe out in the breathing spaces other people take when they need to gather energy. Vacuum-wrapped people are anaemic, so that they don’t putrefy while being vacuum-wrapped. The Man maintains that he had too much life blood, so it fermented, he burst and as he was then able to take in oxygen he could breathe. The Man was let out of the breathing space, which is under- ground, but he still didn’t think there was room for him. He was lite- rally compressed by the atmosphere and his weight increased enormously in just a few days, which causes him trouble with his knees. The reason he has enquired at the lost property office is that this is the day he should have died had he still been a vacuum-wrapped person. As he is now able to take in oxygen and has therefore sur- vived his date of death, he is convinced that he will get his place in life back, and he is looking forward to getting into his stride. He feels reborn, celebrates the day as if it was his birthday and has invited guests for the evening. The Secretary encourages him to find his old creases and does what she can to dampen his enthusiasm. A Woman enters the lost property office, but unlike the Man she is not looking for more space – on the contrary. She has always taken up a lot of room, has been very much in-your-face and people re- coiled from her. After a while she lost weight, no one was there to catch hold of her – and now she can no longer fill herself. She lives quite literally in a void, and asks the Man to mark it out with a piece of chalk, as required by the insurance company which is tired of paying compensation to people with concussion and smashed spectacles from bumping into her. She keeps people at a metre’s distance for fear of hurting anyone else, and often goes to the lost property office to enquire after those she has already pushed away. The Man rebukes the Woman, as she is one of those who are to blame for him having to wrap himself up. It turns out that the Secretary is also a former vacuum-wrapped person, and was in the same breathing space as the Man. She tells him that the actual reason she, and also the Man, got out of the breathing space was that there was a ‘contact’. Vacuum-wrapped and ordinary people live in two different tempi, which side by side make for a daily rhythm, and therefore they never meet. One day someone in the breathing space got out of rhythm, hit the same beat as an ordinary person and contact was made. When they made contact, the vacuum-wrapped person placed their mouth on the other person’s mouth and by some strange means took their breath away. They were discovered stuck to one another, and at the hos- pital it proved impossible to separate them. Their pulses were com- pletely identical, beating together until slowly ebbing out. Following the episode with this contact, the other vacuum-wrapped people in the breathing space were punctured as it was feared that they would also get out of rhythm and more contacts would occur. The Secretary has already survived her date of death and, like the Man, had looked forward to a life with room in which to get into her stride, but reality proved to be different. When she exceeded her sell-by date she was erased from the system, her death notice appeared in the newspaper, her estate was wound up – and she took part in her own funeral. Not even her own family would acknowledge her, as she could no longer prove who she was – although they thought she was an acquaintance, and they praised the speech she held as it was plain to hear that she had known her self really well. Since she has lost all her belongings she now has to work and live at the lost property office, and she hates everyone who comes and makes enquiries, as being forgotten and abandoned reminds her of her own fate. One by one the rest of the punctured vacuum-wrapped people also survive their dates of death, and have to submit to a life as the liv- ing dead. One of them regularly reports himself missing at the lost property office and is allowed to live there for a couple of weeks, until he is taken to the Salvation Army with the rest of the lost property. The Woman in the vacuum makes several more or less unsuccessful attempts to curry favour with the Secretary and parti- cularly the Man, who the Secretary frightens with her story. He is also frequently rung up by undertakers making a good offer, and estate agents who are interested in his apartment. The Man’s sell-by date is approaching, the pressure from the atmos- phere slowly lifts and his previously overtaxed knees stop hurting. Kilos literally drop off him, and when he stands on the scales in the lost property office he can watch his weight falling. At first this plea- ses him, as he feels that now there is going to be room for him, but when the weight loss continues after he has reached his standard weight he becomes scared. The space he has longed for now threat- ens to cancel him out, and he struggles against the weight loss …