Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  Glancing over, she took in Raymond’s slump, the sideways loll of his head, chin dropped, breath like a rustle through fur. That he had fallen back to sleep didn’t matter. There was something for her in driving to Montreal, proof that the past was in the past.

  Without flinching she imagined entering Graham Finnessey’s class, then his office, her glide of sexual confidence, the feel of her jeans tight at her hips, the pressure of their secret; she’d thought of herself as worldly when she had really been so young, so innocent. That was before she’d really fallen, allowed herself to believe she’d found a haven with him. His hands in her hair as they walked in Parc La Fontaine. He’d invited her to come on a trip to New York. He’d said, You are so astonishing to me. I have never done anything like this before and I’ll never do it again. The books, the Westmount apartment, the travel, the bottles of wine, the sex, their entwined lives. They were in bed when he asked her to marry him. He took her home to meet his parents in Kitchener, a slim silver engagement band on her finger. A year and a half later, Graham stood behind a kitchen chair, a short, slim man with mica-bright eyes, violent in his self-interest, and said, Isn’t there some other friend you can say you were meeting at the end of that afternoon rather than me?

  The light began to shift — the blink of an exit ramp as Cornwall passed. Plush shadows lost their depth, as objects, pulled out of the dark, grew more solid. Steering wheel, dashboard, doughnut box. Sara gnawed on a piece of beef jerky and the action of her jaws kept her awake. All those years ago in Beirut, she had only begun to formulate a plan after Hanni, the fixer recommended to her by the Lebanese journalist in Paris, took her, bundled in coat and head scarf, to meet a young man connected to the group who’d kidnapped the Irish and the British journalists. This young man, probably younger than she was, who would not show his face, wedged his cigarette into his lips around the folds of his cloth mask, was angry in a more lethal way than she was, yet willing to talk. Her anger, in the wake of what had happened in Montreal, needed to find some form. Selling the interview to a wire service, reading her handwritten words down a telephone line, felt like vindication. People trusted her and listened to her. She was smart, she could do this, and would prove her trustworthiness by channelling the voices of others in greater extremities than anything she had been through. She approached Canadian papers as a stringer because she wanted Graham, and others, to see what she was doing. Another journalist gave her a name of someone at the LA paper. Her reasons for doing what she was doing were so personal in those days: her need to prove herself in the eyes of others. She’d wanted her parents, out of the direct line of Chernobyl’s radioactive cloud in their Moscow apartment, yet close enough, to see what she was up to as well.

  Raymond Renaud stirred in his sleep. Dawn light gilded him. Soon he would vanish, and whatever she had confided to him, the self that she had revealed, that he had called out of her, would vanish with him, along with the selves that he had revealed to her. Talking to him was like whispering a secret to a tree. Perhaps they’d say hello if he came on tour with the circus, but they’d likely never do more than that, and that was fine.

  He woke just before they crossed the border into Quebec. As she followed Route 20, the southern route, into the city, which became at times less highway than wide suburban boulevard, blinking traffic lights swinging above the trees, Raymond told her about his year as a teenager in a Jesuit seminary outside of Hull, across the river from Ottawa, in Quebec, which must, they worked out, have been around the same time that her parents, heading back to Moscow, had enrolled her in an Ottawa boarding school, not the fancy one but the one she’d always thought of as the school for wayward girls. By then she’d already run away from home, threatened to drop out of school, told her parents she didn’t see why they couldn’t leave her to live somewhere on her own.

  Is there anywhere in particular you want me to drop you? Sara asked. Words rolled out of her mouth like odd-shaped animals. As they passed along the southern perimeter of Dorval, a jet lifted itself into the air. Do you still have family here?

  She could no longer remember if he’d said something about meeting someone, there was only this astonishment: to find herself, at dawn on a Friday morning, sleepless, driving into Montreal. What had she just asked him?

  Any Métro station will do.

  Meanwhile, other scenes flashed before her: an olive grove; scarred Beirut high-rises; a bombed-out tank; the interior of the house of a Kurdish family in Kirkuk; children crying in a hospital in Najaf. A gym change room, yellow lockers, she was pulling on her jeans, a woman’s voice called out. Places that remained inside her and that sleeplessness brought back.

  They approached downtown through the dayless-nightless tunnel of the Autoroute Ville-Marie. There was a hotel that used to be on Sherbrooke at the corner of Peel, or was it Stanley or de la Montagne, not far from the McGill campus, the Château something, which had once been plain and not too pricey, and Sara poured herself toward the hope that it was still there, the street unravelling like a sheet before her. If no one would let her in, she would kick off her sandals and fall asleep in her car. And later she would call David, ask about Greta’s scan, and tell him what she’d done, the thought of speaking to him hovering before her like a beacon.

  At the corner of Stanley and de Maisonneuve, she slid to a stop in front of one of the entrances to the Peel Métro, the street wide and grey and empty of people, just as a uniformed man unlocked the station’s glass doors. Raymond reached into the back seat for his nylon bag.

  Did you tell the people at the Cirque you won’t be going to Washington?

  I’ll call in an hour or so, when the time is a little more reasonable.

  Sympathy seized her, at the thought of all that he was hurtling toward. Good luck with everything. I truly wish you the best and hope for the absolute best for the boy. She pulled her handbag from the back seat, fumbled through her wallet, and extracted what bills she had, five twenties, offered these, and Raymond took the money with a nod.

  You have been so generous. If there’s ever anything, I don’t know what I can do, but something. You must ask. He touched her arm.

  Out on the sidewalk, he in his rumpled jacket, she in her creased clothes, they hugged, and he kissed her three times, cheek to cheek to cheek, the Ethiopian way, he said. She kissed him twice, the Montreal way. I can’t thank you enough. For an instant she thought he would say something more. But, no. His hug deepened, hard and close, before his arms released her.

  He didn’t slip into the Métro. Picking up his bag, he set off at a jog along the street.

  What? Juliet said, and her voice rose.

  It was dusk on Labour Day Monday. Sara had not tried to reach Juliet earlier in the day to tell her about the circus performers’ flight, since it was a holiday and Juliet might not be home. When she did reach her, Juliet said, yes, she and Max had been away for the weekend, they’d just got back, traffic was awful, while outside Sara’s kitchen window, rays of light grew long in the west, and crickets hummed, and the soul-destroying racket of the air show had rumbled off for another year. On the expressway down by the lake, as on every other highway in the city, people would be stewing in their cars. On the table in front of Sara, ice settled in her tumbler of Scotch. She had not spoken to Juliet since the night of the circus benefit in July.

  Even if they’re speaking about abuse, they’re only allegations, she said. And it didn’t mention what kind of abuse, just consistently.

  Did it say who? Juliet asked in the same keening tone. Which of them ran off?

  No names, only that there were nine of them, and they were older, mostly teenagers.

  Boys, girls?

  The article didn’t specify so I assume both.

  What kinds of abuse are there?

  Physical. Sexual. Her elbows on the table, one hand raked into her hair, internal discomfort contorting itself within her, Sara swallowed a sip of Scotch and the ice cubes chattered, and Juliet heard this.

&n
bsp; Her hearing it registered as a pause, before Juliet continued, He told me he was going to send me some tapes from the Australian tour, either something he’d shot, or media clips, or he’d put me in touch with someone else, and I heard from him right after they got there and then nothing even though he knew I was on deadline and in the midst of editing.

  An ordinary airplane groaned through the sky. Julie, Sara asked, using the old name, the one that Juliet had gone by in their Montreal days, I have to ask, did you notice anything, anything at all, when you were in Addis?

  No, Juliet said vehemently. No. They all seemed so — happy. Busy and sometimes stressed but happy. He wasn’t violent or brutal. Or — inappropriate? There were always children around him, but he was working with them. Nothing was the way it would be here. But they were all so committed to the circus.

  All afternoon Sara had gone back over the hours she’d spent with Raymond Renaud in her car: his urgency to return, his upset over the boy, his juggling in front of the two boys in the service centre. His being distraught about the paralyzed boy or juggling in the service centre weren’t necessarily suspect; nor, at the time, had she felt anything unusual in his attention to the two boys. He had seemed kind and overwhelmed. Mercurial? It would have been monstrous not to be upset about the boy so badly hurt while in his care. There had been a sense of intimacy between them.

  I know it’s selfish, Juliet was saying, especially now, but I can’t help thinking about my film, what’s going to happen to my film?

  It’s not good, Sara said and felt a twinge of responsibility at having set Juliet up with this story. But you don’t know yet that he’s done anything. You don’t know what’s happened. Nothing is certain. I’ll hunt around and see what more I can find out.

  Thank you, Juliet said and her voice wobbled, as if on the verge of tears.

  Upstairs again, in the blue of twilight, Sara reconnected the modem and pulled the article from the Sydney Morning Herald back onto the screen, still in her sundress, bare feet wrapped around the rungs of her chair. David was probably home by now. He’d told her that Greta’s parents were throwing a party for her, for them, everyone breathing now with cautious optimism, two more months since her last clear scan in July. The most important thing, she told herself, was not to overreact.

  Nine performers in the Ethiopian children’s circus, Cirkus Mirak, have defected and are applying for asylum in Australia, the migration agent representing the performers has announced. The performers fled the circus last Thursday night and claim that circus founder and director Canadian Raymond Renaud consistently abused them. The circus was on a ten-day tour of Australia, and appeared most recently at the Sydney Alternative Arts Festival, its acrobatic performances hailed by critics and crowds alike.

  The youngsters, aged 15–19, are recovering from their ordeal, according to migration agent Sem Le. The youngest of the group were put in the care of child protection authorities. The oldest were offered temporary housing.

  She had already worked out that migration agent was an Australian term for what she would have called an immigration consultant, and that Sem Le was in fact an immigration lawyer. She had tracked down his Sydney office number; he seemed to run his own firm. His was a Vietnamese name, and so perhaps he was an immigrant, and had even been a refugee, his parents fleeing across the sea by boat, bringing him as a small child with them. He might have intimate knowledge of harrowing journeys to outrun the past. It was nearly eight o’clock in the evening in Toronto, which meant that it was nearly ten on a Tuesday morning in Sydney, fourteen hours ahead.

  And it made sense to try him first, to see what he would tell her and if he would prove a possible route to Raymond Renaud’s alleged victims and accusers, whom she must have seen perform all those months ago in Copenhagen. The older ones: among them, the girl contortionist, the boy with the hint of a moustache. The sweet scent of trees blew in through the open window.

  G’day. His receptionist’s voice sounded young and twangy, full of wide-open vowels cantering across a sun-baked landscape. How can I help you?

  I’d like to speak to Mr. Le. And how should she introduce herself, since she had no intention of writing about this, yet if she did not identify herself as a journalist, what reason would Sem Le have for speaking to her, or she for trying to solicit information from him. Sara gave her name and the name of her newspaper. I’m trying to find out more about the children who ran off from Cirkus Mirak, the Ethiopian circus.

  Can you hold on, please, the receptionist said, and the line beeped in a different way than it did at home.

  A new voice, male, cut in, brisk and cheerful. Good day, good day. Australian, with a hint of somewhere else.

  Sara explained: who she was, where she was from, that she was looking for more details about the circus case, why the performers had run, what precisely their allegations were.

  Yeah, it’s a very sad story, Sem Le said. Terrible. The allegations are of profound mistreatment. Physical and sexual abuse. Working under unsafe conditions. Failure to pay a basic wage. Are you writing about this?

  Part of her floated, suspended, as Raymond Renaud contracted in front of her. Possibly. He’s from here originally, the circus founder, and is he —

  Yeah, he’s the one they’re alleging did these things, Renaud, the bloke who runs the circus.

  Confirmation made her heart race. Did they say these, all these things occurred on an ongoing basis?

  We’re trying to pin down details. Their English is not great. We have a translator working with them. And a counsellor. They called me in, yeah, after they took off. I’ve worked with a few prominent cases, but never so many at once. Kids running from a circus, not to a circus. They’re in shock. Pro bono, but how could I say no to that?

  Where are they now?

  Still in Sydney. There’s a church group helping them that works with asylum seekers. It’s a challenge because there’s so many of them. Six boys, three girls. And for the moment they can’t work. The older ones. And they have no money. We’re thinking of moving them to Melbourne, where there’s more of an Ethiopian community.

  And they’re all making these allegations?

  Yeah. So far. Sounds like there was something nasty going on over there. Looks good from the outside, but they’re trapped under this bloke’s thumb. This is what they’ve told me. Tragic, really. They’re quite shaken up. Obviously we’ll be working closely with the Ethiopian authorities.

  Was it hard for them to get away? Given there’s so many of them.

  They waited until the night before they were to fly back, then had to choose their moment. Naturally he was keeping a close eye on them. They couldn’t take anything with them in case he spotted them. They were all in the same hotel. Two of the boys did run into him, the director, in the elevator, and had to act like nothing was on. Three of them got out in the service elevator and spent the night in a park. One of the others saw him in the lobby and had to hide and did a runner anyway. The girls caught a cab and ended up at a hostel. The rest of the boys spent the night at the coach station.

  And they knew how to make an asylum claim?

  I believe they had some contact with people beforehand who told them what to do.

  Is one of the girls a contortionist?

  A what?

  In the circus, in their acts, there’s one who’s particularly flexible —

  So you’ve seen them?

  I saw them perform once.

  Well, I don’t know that.

  Would it be possible to talk to any of them about what they went through?

  No, Sem Le said. They won’t be giving interviews.

  Sara set down the phone and unclenched the hand that had been cinched around the receiver and went on listening in the silence to what she had just heard. Had the older ones fled because they were the only ones able to get away? Across the world, they moved into a new day, circus-less, perhaps still clad in clothes that smelled of home, and Sem Le, their champion, whom she imagin
ed as compact and stocky, rose briskly from his desk, smacked his hands, or called out to his receptionist, or once more grabbed the ringing phone.

  She had the number of the woman who ran the Sydney Alternative Arts Festival beside her. After Sara introduced herself, Holly Mercury’s assistant said, I’m sorry, she’s not available, with the air of one distracted by someone else vying for her attention. Just a moment, please. The line clicked into a hold, and then an older woman’s voice came on, blunt and low, and identified herself as Holly Mercury.

  I’d like to make a few things clear, all right? There were absolutely no rumours preceding their arrival. They played in festivals across Europe, and I had no word of any issues. And there was no sign of any inappropriate behaviour while they were here. They were here for a week, and in Melbourne and Adelaide before that. Also, I had very little contact with them. I saw them in rehearsal once and on opening night, and then I happened to be at the hotel to say goodbye when he found out they’d taken off. He was trying to round them all up, there was a bus waiting, it was chaos. One of the others told him they’d split. I suppose some of them must have known.

  What did he do?

  He seemed shocked. He had to get the others to the airport. I told him I’d see what I could do to help. This was before I got word from the police and their legal agent.

  So there had, Sara thought, been this much planning. To bolt on the verge of their return to Ethiopia left Raymond Renaud no time to track down the runaways before he had to race to catch a plane with the rest of the children. They had known to make an asylum claim: someone at some point had told them what and how. Perhaps they had been plotting their escape for months. In March, as she’d watched them onstage in Copenhagen, performing and taking their breathless bows, the idea had already been coursing through them. They had whispered about it behind his back. In a hotel room, behind a closed door, someone said, This is what we will do.