Landed by Tim Pears

feel like one of the Marx Brothers, you know?’ Owen said, smiling. ‘Groucho Marx, and his reflection?’ I nodded, though
I didn’t really know what he was talking about, until I happened to watch the film Duck Soup with my children some while later, with its wonderful mirror scene. But I guessed at the time that as the pain diminished so Owen was rediscovering his sense of humour.
    Afterwards, I gave Owen the mirror box to take home with him. He proceeded to use it whenever he was in pain, half a dozen times a day. The relief would continue after he stopped using it, for varying lengths of time. He occasionally rang me up to tell me how well things were going or to express disappointment that he was unable to get rid of the pain for good: however long relief lasted – hours, a day – the pain always reasserted itself in the end.
    The last time I saw Owen was a year or so later. A Thursday afternoon in March, about a quarter past three. I was driving along Chester Road. The day had been a wet one. It had only just stopped raining, and although there were still black clouds on the right-hand side of the sky the sun had come out on the other. The light was dramatic: it was as if everything to one’s right was a giant stage, lit up for performance against a thunderous backdrop.
    I caught sight of two figures on the right-hand side of the pavement up ahead, striding along. One was Owen. In his hook he held the handle of a spade, whose shaft rested on his shoulder. A boy, his son, I presume, walked beside him, holding his father’s left hand. The boy carried some small tool, a trowel, I think, in his left hand. Unlike other dishevelled pedestrians around them, Owen’s and his son’s clothes were dry. The two of them strode along in the light that comes after a storm.
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    The mirror box was an extraordinarily simple therapeutic tool which had profound implications for our understanding of how
the brain adapts to the loss of a limb, and how phantom limb pain occurs and can be controlled. At the Centre we’re now, in partnership with researchers at Manchester University, at the stage of moving on into the realm of technology that Dr Ramachandran first envisioned: computer graphics imaging. Mirror box therapy did not cure phantom limb pain for good, but we believe that it was a vital step towards that eventual aim.

The Burrows
    T he first time he saw them it happened by chance, after dusk, one warm June evening.
    It was two summers after Owen’s long stay on the hill. He’d been back a few times since, increasingly useful, with an appetite for work, and stamina, fortitude. Becoming a countryman: less comfortable indoors than out; no more wish than his grandfather to return to the homestead with light fading around him. Eyes dilating in the twilight, and Grandma’s dimly lit cottage was too bright, the men forced to blink like owls as they stepped inside.
    Owen was pulling thistles in the pasture furthest down away from the farm towards the Malt House. He’d volunteered to clear a few when his grandfather limped inside for tea, knowing it would please the old man, wanting to stay out. Daylight like food you craved more of, greedy for the last dregs.
    The heads of the thistles were still tight, purple; they had to be got now. Later the flower heads would open and a breeze scatter the down, benevolent fairy-like flurries of it, drifting across the hillside, carrying their evil seeds. Creeping thistle was the exception: it spread through its roots, extending underground. ‘Can’t beat that bastard,’ Grandpa admitted. Fortunately rare in these parts. The air had been damp and drizzly, the ground was soft, so long as he didn’t yank but gave a gradual tug to the weed its roots yielded. Owen laid the stringy carcasses out on the grass to perish and wilt. He understood by now the interconnecting chains of species essential to each other,
the intricate