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generally operate by a steel cable attached, via metal links in a cuff running the length of the arm, to a trunk harness. The client puts tension on the cable by flexing his shoulder; the cable pulls and operates to either open or close the hook’s two steel or aluminium digits. These digits can act either like a finger and oppositional thumb or like two adjacent fingers. Their grasp force is determined by rubber bands encircling the base.
    Because the tips of the fingers of a hook are small, the client can see the object to be grasped more easily than with the thicker fingers of a prosthetic hand. They’re also much cheaper than bespoke hands, and although our priority is to provide whatever an individual client needs, he or she may well reject an illchosen prosthesis and simply not wear it. If it was one of the most expensive types, then we’ve clearly wasted money. And we were already at that time working to a tightly controlled budget at the Centre.
    Owen took to his hook with relish. He subjected it to all kinds of tests, challenging it and himself to do pretty well everything he could before the accident. Within a short space of time he was able to operate tools, though for other reasons was unable to return to work. He also liked gimmicky aspects of having it: holding a cigarette between the claws, or trying to juggle with soft balls. He was always making jokes.
    â€˜Sorry to keep you waiting,’ I said once, when the previous appointment had run over.
    â€˜No problem,’ Owen said. ‘Having a good chat I was with the other cybermen out there.’
    A proportion of clients – particularly men – make light of their condition with such flippancy, but Owen was intelligent.
He understood, for example, that I must have heard all such cracks many times before, and he’d add an ironic touch. He once greeted me as he came into my office by raising his hook and saying, ‘Can you hear the clock ticking, Peter?’
    Now I used to look younger than my age, and with my short hair I could be described as boyish. And most actors who play the role of Peter Pan are boyish women, aren’t they? So Owen was making the almost obligatory such prosthesis-wearer’s reference to himself as Captain Hook, but playing with it to include me. And the question itself referred not only to the clock swallowed by the crocodile, who you’ll remember was after Hook, but also perhaps to time that was after me. How long would I remain a boyish, young-looking woman?
    Perhaps Owen was also flirting, in a mild way.
    I became aware, however, of two possibly contradictory aspects of Owen’s behaviour. He made out he didn’t care what people thought, making jokes at his own expense, yet one always felt that he was hiding something – which indeed he was: the loss of his hand was as nothing compared to his greater loss. I was never sure, to be honest, whether the rehabilitation with which I assisted him was also helping him come to terms with his grief, or rather offering him a peculiar form of denial.
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    Such was the speed of Owen’s recovery that I stopped seeing him after three months. When he telephoned the Centre a further six months later, however, to book an appointment with me, I was not surprised. The pattern was a common one.
    The persistence of sensation in and awareness of limbs after
they have been amputated has long been known. A French surgeon wrote of the phenomenon in the sixteenth century. Admiral Lord Nelson lost his right arm in 1797, and thereafter felt the fingers of his absent hand digging into his palm. Pondering this survival of the hand’s spirit after its physical loss, Nelson decided it was direct evidence for the existence of the soul.
    During the American Civil War thousands of wounded soldiers developed gangrene and had their infected limbs sawn off in field tents. A Philadelphian physician, Silas Weir Mitchell, later worked with many of these veterans