Landed (28 page)

Something is happening to Owen's hearing. He cannot hear the meadow pipit when he looks at it. He returns his gaze to Mel and the children and then he hears the bird. As if a person's auditory ability was purely mechanical, microphones are facing the wrong way or something; some dial is in need of adjustment.

He can hear other things far away, he reckons. The whine of a chainsaw. The tolling of a church bell.

Mel has an arm across each of her children's shoulders. Then Holly turns inward, towards her mother's body, and slips backwards out of the embrace. She looks towards Owen and breaks into a smile. ‘Rosie,' she says, bending forward. ‘Rosie.' The brown mongrel dog walks fast towards her with a sort of shy shuffle, wagging its tail. She kneels down, and when the dog reaches her she hugs it, talking quietly.

Once again Owen cannot hear, though this time he cannot hear anything else either. Nothing at all. His ears are filled up with silence. He cannot hear them, they cannot see him, he is observation, he is mind.

 

Mel kneels on the ground in a spot where a rock and a hillock shelter her. She has opened a cardboard box, and opens a transparent plastic bag within the box, unfurling the bag over the outside. She lifts the box, tilts it and pours a grainy grey-white powder onto the grass. She stops, moves the box to one side, and pours again, making a second pile. The children watch, scrutinising the accuracy, the fairness, of the operation. As the box empties, Mel pours with increasing care to make each pile the same size.

When the box is empty Mel pulls apart the flaps that make up the bottom, and folds its sides together so that it is flat. She puts the cardboard into a bag that was lying in the grass, and pulls out a sheet of paper.

 

How is it possible to love a woman, to make children together, and let her fall out of love with you? To fall out of love with her? It is possible, it happened. It seems like insanity now.

 

Owen would give anything to watch his children. Just a little longer. He has nothing to give. They will live their lives unseen by him.

Will he see Sara now? He does not believe so. Of course not. But he is such a stupid man, he has been so ignorant, he knows nothing, nothing at all.

 

Mel is reading from the sheet of paper words Owen cannot hear. First Josh, then Holly, pick up a handful of the powder. Josh says something to his sister as he turns his back towards the wind, and she copies him. Josh hurls the handful of ash up high into the air. It swirls away from him.

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. A
nd 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

 

 

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