“You’re really weird,” he said, putting down his coffee spoon and looking intently at me. “You care more about Heinlein than about the Ruthie thing.”
“Well of course I do,” I said, and then felt awful. “What I mean is, whatever it was with Ruthie, nobody says you did anything to deliberately hurt her. You were both stupid, and she was even stupider, from the best I can tell. That matters in one way, but good grief, Wim, surely in a universal sense Robert A. Heinlein matters a lot more however you look at it.”
“I suppose so,” he said. He laughed. I could see the woman behind the counter looking at us in a curious way. “I hadn’t thought about it exactly like that.”
I laughed too. The woman behind the counter and what she thought didn’t matter at all. “From the distance of Alpha Centauri, from the perspective of posterity?”
“It could have been posterity,” he said, more soberly. “If Ruthie had been pregnant.”
“Did you really dump her because you thought she was?” I asked. I put the last bite of my bun into my mouth.
“No! I dumped her because she told everyone before she told me, so it was all over everywhere and I heard it second hand. She walked into Boots and bought a pregnancy testing kit. She told her mother. She told her friends. She might as well have bought a megaphone and stood in the market square. And then she wasn’t even pregnant after all. I dumped her because of what you said, because she was stupid. Stupid. What a moron.” He shook his head. “And then the shunning started. I might have been poison. They seemed to think that because I’d slept with her I ought to marry her and tie myself to her forever even though there wasn’t even a baby.”
“Why didn’t you tell people that?”
“Tell who? The whole town? Janine? I don’t think so. They won’t listen to me anyway. They think they know something about me. They don’t.” His face was hard.
“But you have a girlfriend now,” I said, encouragingly.
He rolled his eyes. “Shirley? Actually I’ve dumped her too. She’s another moron, not quite as bad as Ruthie, but close. She’s working in the laundry at the school, and she’s quite happy to keep on doing that until she gets married. She was making getting married noises at me, so I broke up with her.”
“You certainly get through them,” I said, because I didn’t know what to say.
“It would be different with someone who wasn’t a moron,” he said, and he was looking at me carefully, and I thought maybe he meant he was interested, but he couldn’t be, not Wim, not in me, and I was feeling breathless enough without that.
“Let’s go and see if I can find you an elf,” I said.
He frowned. “Look, it’s all right,” he said. “I know you were just saying that because—well, I’d asked you a very strange question, and you were in a lot of pain on that thing and…”
“No, it is real,” I said. “I don’t know if you’re going to be able to see them, because you have to believe first, but I think you nearly do. You don’t have pierced ears or anything that would stop you. Just promise you won’t get all sarcastic and hate me if you can’t see them.”
“I don’t know what to think,” he said, standing up. “Look, Mori, you kind of like me, right?”
“Right,” I said, cautiously, staying where I was. He was way up above me, but I didn’t want to be struggling to my feet.
“I kind of like you too,” he said.
For an instant, I felt wonderfully happy, and then I remembered about the karass magic. I’d cheated. I’d made it happen. He didn’t really like me, well, maybe he did, but he liked me because the magic had made him like me. That didn’t mean he didn’t really think he liked me now, of course, but it made it much more complicated.
“Come on,” I said, and struggled to my feet, putting my coat on. Wim put on a scruffy brown duffle coat and went out. I followed him out onto the pavement.
There was an Indian woman with a baby in a pushchair just coming out of the bookshop as we came out. She was wearing a headscarf, which made me think of Nasreen and wonder how she was getting on. We waited for her to pass us and then crossed the road to the pond, where the mallards were chasing each other.
“You don’t want to talk about it?” Wim asked.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him about the karass magic, and I couldn’t think what was ethical, if I’d sort of accidentally bewitched him. It was a little bit exhilarating and a little bit terrifying, and it felt as if gravity wasn’t quite as strong as normally, or as if someone had decreased the oxygen or something.
“I’ve never seen you at a loss for words,” he said.
“Very few people have,” I said.