For a moment I remain still. Alone with my gratitude, my disgust, my anger.
I feel something warm on the back of my hand, like dripping candle wax. I realise I’m crying.
Then I get up.
‘I found something out,’ I say. ‘These last months. Something I never knew before. Do you know what’s at the very deepest part of us, inside the Effect?’
She says nothing.
‘Other people, Andrea. In the very deepest part of us are other people.’
I look at her one last time. In the dim light, I try to take as much of her with me as I can.
Then I turn and leave.
As I step through the gate in the fence, out onto the street, a shadow emerges. My ballet prince.
His own mother would need a voice test to identify him. His uniform is in tatters.
He stops and looks at me. His eyes tell me what his face cannot.
‘Lars,’ I say, ‘I’m forty-three. I’ve breastfed two children. I’ve got saggy boobs and grey hairs in their thousands. You’re starting out in life, I’m heading for my pension.’
‘Shakespeare says this, in the hundred and fourth sonnet: To me, fair friend, you never can be old …’
A car pulls up at the kerb. It’s the hearse, with Laban at the wheel. He turns off the engine, extracts first his crutch, then his legs, and draws himself upright in front of us.
‘Susan, I’ve composed a small piece of music. About the two of us. It’s kind of a serenade. The first line is: To the stars, your eyes are wishing wells …’
He starts singing. I start walking. They tag along at my sides, Laban singing in my right ear, my ballet prince reciting in the left. I hope they’re too disabled to start fighting.
In the occasional house, faces appear in the windows and look out at us. Maybe it’s the Effect.
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Epub ISBN: 9781473523791
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Harvill Secker
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Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Peter Høeg and Rosinante/GB-forlagene A/S, Copenhagen 2014
English translation copyright © Martin Aitken 2017
Peter Høeg has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Harvill Secker in 2017
First published with the title Effekten af Susan in Denmark by Rosinante in 2014
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Peter Høeg, The Susan Effect
(Series: # )
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