Landed

by Tim Pears

  Holly watches and seems to change her mind. She bends and throws hers on the ground like a farmer scattering seed.

  Owen is mind, dissolving, like snowflakes, like alcohol in the flesh of a broken man, like ash on the wind, like breath to the sky. The cells of consciousness are relinquished into blue.

  For all flesh is as grass. Mel reads slowly, deliberately, in a voice not used to reading. And all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof fadeth away.

  But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.

  Yellow gorse, green grass, the smell of sheep on a Welsh hill. Josh swerves and veers down the hillside, his arms outstretched, calling like a lapwing. Holly and the dog chase each other. Mel follows them down, towards the car. No one sees them.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to Anne Marie van Es, Carl Cato and Anne Zigmond in the Prosthetics Department, Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford; to ferreter Ann Truman; to Andy Garden of the Institute of Traffic Accident Investigators.

  Particularly helpful books were Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran & Sandra Blakeslee, and Badgers by Michael Clark; and case studies from online publication The Emperor’s New Clothes: Divorce Process & Consequence by The Cheltenham Group.

  The author is grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for a Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University that supported the writing of this book. He also benefitted from a stay at Mount Pleasant Retreat for Artists, Writers and Musicians in Surrey.

  Heartfelt thanks to Haydn Middleton and Rebecca Gowers; to Craig Weston, Henry Shukman and Richard Parry; to Hania Porucznik; to Jason Arthur.

  Copyright © 2011 Tim Pears

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by William Heinemann, Random House

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pears, Tim, 1956 –

  Landed : a novel / Tim Pears.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-582-43891-7

  1. Amputees—Fiction. 2. Nature—Effect of human beings on—Fiction. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Daughters—Death—Fiction. 5. Gardening—Fiction. 6. Wales—Fiction. 7. Birmingham (England)—Fiction. 8. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR6066.E1675L362011

  823’.914—dc22

  2011005398

  Typeset in Fournier MT by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

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