Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  Or they had not considered running at all until after arriving in Australia: something had happened there, or things had reached a breaking point. Or, or — Australia itself had beckoned: the lure of taps that ran endless water and large TV screens filled with multiple channels and shops as bright and glittery as peacocks’ tails. All of this tugged at them. There was a leader. They had come up with the plan together. There was horror here somewhere but what kind of horror.

  From downstairs came the thud of the back door being pulled tight against its frame, which marked the return of Kumiko, her basement tenant, without whom she would never have been able to afford the house. The house that she was glad to have despite the grief tied up in its purchase, the stability of a place that she could call her own.

  In the kitchen, to a warble of Japanese making its way from Kumiko’s answering machine up through the floorboards, Sara poured herself another drink and, in front of the fridge, pressed an ice cube to her forehead, felt the sear of its wet cold. There had to be two or three legs to the journey from Sydney back to Addis Ababa, via Bangkok or Dubai, and he was trapped in his seat as he had been in her car, nine empty seats around him, the other children silent or upset or whispering, the rift between him and them widening. Would he have the strength or the self-composure or whatever it took to try to comfort them? Or had he willed them to stay silent, desperate that they not speculate among themselves. She had never followed up to find out what had happened to the paralyzed boy. Perhaps Juliet knew. Ahead of him: the calls or visits he would have to make to inform the parents of the runaways that their children had vanished. Since he was responsible for them. Either he had every reason to know why they had done what they’d done, or he had some intimation, or he was caught entirely by surprise. On the plane, there would be time to think. She rubbed the ice cube across her forehead. She had no idea how to think of him. On the plane, all he would have known for certain was that they’d taken off.

  Drink in hand, she made her way back upstairs to the warmer second floor and her home office at the front of the house, where the coloured swirls of the screensaver made blue swoops across the darkening walls until her fingers touched the keyboard. When she searched, she found no news from Addis Ababa, nothing posted online from the English-language paper there. The press newsfeeds were full of thickets of postings about the Americans threatening air strikes against Iraq.

  One night, sometime after his return, he would have answered the phone and heard someone say, There is an investigation. This is what you are alleged to have done. Afterward his clothes would be the same and the room around him and nothing else. She had seen him in distress, glimpsed his particular tincture of fear and rage. One kind of horror if he’d done what he was accused of and another if he had not.

  He was out there somewhere, and something led from her to him. She rose to her feet and swallowed a mouthful of whisky. What she owed him was the space in which to be innocent without dismissing the story of his accusers. The internal juggling act was trying to hold both these things in her head at once. He was not charged with anything. Her body coiled in horror and disbelief and fear and compassion and with the desire not to judge, because legally it was wrong as yet to judge him, either him or his accusers, but him in particular because he was the accused and as yet only accused and in some small way she knew what this felt like.

  Downstairs and out the front door, she took a seat, hugging her knees, on the top step of the porch. A breeze sighed through the maple tree, lit green from behind by the street lamp. She balanced the moist circle of her glass first on one knee, then on the other. The past came flowing back.

  After her first police interview, she’d told herself it was natural that the police wanted to speak to her, since she’d been in the vicinity when the theft was discovered. And Graham had been offhand yet reassuring: it was a stolen wallet and credit card, a small thing. He’d asked about the woman whose wallet was stolen and Sara had tried to pull the blurry stranger into focus. In truth, she’d barely noticed the woman, maybe late twenties, not overweight but soft around the edges and frankly a little hysterical when she’d discovered her wallet was gone.

  The day the two police officers showed up at their door to search the Westmount apartment, the first thing Graham asked, after the officers had left, was what address Sara had given them. He persisted: why hadn’t she used the address of the apartment on Saint-Viateur, where she kept a room at his request? Because, Sara said, it seemed a bad idea to give an address and phone number of a place where she didn’t actually live and never was. He was standing on the far side of the living room, her fiancé. She couldn’t believe they were having this argument, her mind full of policemen’s hands in transparent gloves working their way through their underwear drawers and cupboards and closets. The police, so callous and insistent. She wanted Graham to say: This is outrageous. She yelled at him: Aren’t you on my side? She had the alarming sensation of the whole world tilting sideways.

  After she was charged and booked and allowed to go with restrictions — unable to use a credit card, not to approach within twenty metres of any of the stores from which goods had been stolen, including the two big downtown department stores — she took a bus back to the apartment on de Maisonneuve, which was still technically Graham’s, locked and bolted the door, and didn’t call Graham but lay in her boots and sheepskin coat and the cheap sunglasses she’d bought on the way home on the sofa that was also his, and in those moments the most stunning sensation had been her absolute loss of control, a vertigo of wondering what she had done to make Colleen Bertucci convinced that she was the thief, the police believe Colleen not her, the store clerks unwavering that she was the one, her own helplessness. Her adamancy that she had done nothing made no difference. Lying on the sofa, she began to cough and couldn’t stop.

  All this remained alive in her. The catch in her throat. Such a thing could happen to anyone. Couldn’t it? Small things cast long shadows. Somewhere a raccoon shrieked.

  The next morning, Tuesday, the streetcar that Sara rode to work was filled with children, teenaged girls in tiny kilts, small kids weighed down beneath oversized knapsacks, all of them chattery with the return to school. The newsroom had an autumnal buzziness, despite the heat of the day outside, or else simply a social fervour after the long weekend. People gathered, mugs clasped in hands, to chat about the American air strikes against Iraq and the royal divorce. Within the flimsy barricades of her cubicle, Sara swung a sweater over her shoulders and called Juliet at home, and Juliet answered on the first ring.

  Keeping her voice down, she explained how the performers had fled the hotel at night and spelled out what the allegations against Raymond Renaud were.

  All those things, Juliet said.

  Julie, when you were there, I have to ask again, did you notice anything, anything at all that struck you as suspicious?

  No, Juliet said, and I really didn’t feel like he was trying to hide anything from me, but now everything looks suspect.

  What about your assistant?

  I haven’t called him yet.

  Julie, are there people I can talk to, in Addis, say, who might know more?

  Are you going to write about this?

  No. No. That isn’t why. I’ll pass on to you whatever I find out.

  Maybe I should be the one doing this, Juliet said. But right now I feel so stunned, I can’t.

  Would you be willing to show me some of your footage?

  I guess. Sure. Why?

  I’d be interested in seeing what there is to see, of him, and the circus. I’m curious to see what it looks like. You know there’s still a film to be made of all this.

  Sara wanted to see him again in whatever way she could. She needed to sense if there was something crucial about him that she ought to have noticed. And, if she had missed some sign of deeper corruption, after spending all those intimate hours in a car with him, what did this reveal about her? Not to mention her uneasy sense of feeling implicated
because she had helped him return to Addis Ababa and the circus children.

  Juliet said, Only I don’t know if it’s a film I want to make.

  Tomorrow’s not good, Sara said, but what about Thursday after work?

  Juliet held open a glass door that led into the cool, dim vestibule of a small warehouse building on Bathurst north of Queen. Immediately behind her, a flight of stairs led upward. Sunglasses off, eyes adjusting, Sara stepped in from the heat, the outside air thick and sultry even though it was September and afternoon shadows were creeping down from the western housetops as the sun slid low in the sky. A crease quivered between Juliet’s brows, and strands of her hair, most of it clipped back, wisped about her face. In a black dress and little turquoise cardigan, she led Sara up the flight of stairs, through another door, past a small seating area where two sofas were set in an L, and down a corridor of closed doors to the one marked Suite C, which Juliet, shoulders hunched, unlocked. Inside the edit suite, the walls were covered in black felt, and metal shelves climbed up one wall, and there were two monitors, one set upon a metal cart, the other on a desktop. A blue-white tube of fluorescent lighting trembled overhead.

  It had been a long time, Sara thought, since she and Juliet had been alone in a room together. In the early years after their separate moves to Toronto, they had met in bars and restaurants or galleries, and a couple of times, at Juliet’s invitation, had gone to see dance together, although in those days Sara was often out of town. The last time they’d been alone in a room with this kind of privacy had been when Sara had come to live with Juliet and her roommates in the apartment on avenue de l’Esplanade in Montreal, after she had walked out on Graham or Graham had thrown her out, and Juliet had bumped into her one February afternoon as she sat near the campus in a Van Houtte coffee shop, a knapsack bulging with her belongings at her feet.

  It was strange to think of Raymond Renaud as the agent of their new proximity, and uncomfortably strange to find herself once more wanting something from Juliet. As Juliet tucked her keys into the leather handbag that hung from a hook on the back of the door, Sara tried to determine if Juliet seemed resentful of her, given that the circus story had altered so radically since she’d first told Juliet about it. Not noticeably. Juliet must have considered how Sara’s history would shape her interest in Raymond Renaud’s predicament, although neither of them had mentioned this.

  How’s Max?

  Great, Juliet said. He’s working on a new show. Actually, he’s kind of gone off in a new direction. He’s using images from surveillance cameras broadcasting on the web, so capturing pictures from a stream of images rather than taking them but still choosing them or creating them?

  Sometimes Sara found herself wondering what kept confident Max and anxious Juliet together: Juliet’s loyalty and admiration and adoration? Something sexual? They’d been together for around five years. These days, Max’s photographs of derelict urban landscapes and ruined industrial sites sold for far more than she could ever contemplate paying for a piece of art. No doubt Juliet had hoped her film would be her own way to step forward artistically. Now this had happened.

  Juliet, I am so sorry about this whole business.

  With a grimace, Juliet took a seat in front of the monitor on the desk, wrapped a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and, aiming for a smile, patted the chair next to her. A black bound notebook lay on the desk, a pair of speakers to either side of the monitors, some papers scrawled with what Sara thought were called time codes, and, beside an ordinary keyboard, a contraption with a joystick on it, presumably for manipulating the tape. Businesslike, Juliet plucked a mini cassette tape, small enough to fit in her palm, from a pile on the desk and slid it into the mouth of the videocassette player, which swallowed it with a mechanical gurgle. I wasn’t sure what you’d want to see, and there are a lot of rushes, and I could have shown you the rough cut I’ve been working on, but now I feel too weird about it, so I’ve cued up a few other things.

  Weak air-conditioning attempted to cool the room, stuffy with odours of dust and sweat. A small plastic fan clamped to the side of one metal shelf waved some air across them. Juliet reached to switch off the overhead light as an image flared onto the monitor screen: a dirt path by the side of a road sped past, presumably shot through the window of a moving vehicle. There were trees and people walking along the tamped red earth, women in sweaters and flowered dresses with plastic bags swinging from their hands; a man in a suit came close then vanished; a flock of goats or sheep skittered from the road into the comfort of a ditch; a barefoot boy trudged behind a wooden wheelbarrow; voices outside brayed and were whipped away like flags while voices from within the car mumbled and fluttered. The footage felt real because it was raw.

  This is our first full day, Juliet said. We’re on our way to the circus compound. Where they rehearse? We saw them perform the first night we arrived, in a field outside the Italian embassy, but you’ve seen them perform so I decided not to show you that.

  A donkey trotted along, skinny poles of wood lashed to its sides; a gas station appeared on the right as the car made a sharp turn to the left and scrunched to a stop on dirt and stones. Whoever was holding the camera climbed from the car, footsteps crunching as the view lurched across more scrubby trees and the dusty yellow planes of the car, before rising up the length of a wooden pole at the top of which the cut-out wooden figure of a boy balanced on his hands, legs in the air. His unitard was painted pink, his body red-brown, a splash of black hair daubed atop his head.

  Did you get hold of your assistant? Sara asked.

  Juliet muted the sound as the car and its passengers jolted up a steep hill, stones projecting from the craterous red dirt, a scrim of trees bouncing outside the car window.

  Justin was totally shocked. He spent more time hanging out with the performers than I did, the older ones. But they didn’t speak much English and mostly they were goofing around or trying to teach him to juggle or playing soccer. He said he didn’t notice anything. They didn’t seem upset. They didn’t talk to him about Raymond.

  On the screen, at the top of the hillside, where the land levelled into a flat parking area, a white pickup truck, coated in a skin of red dirt, was parked alongside a couple of older, smaller cars. Light glinted off the windshields. Across a hummocky expanse of dirt and grass rose two yellowish single-storey buildings, a fringe of trees beyond them, and on the ground, in front of the buildings, moved a clump of human figures, all of them small, maquette-sized.

  Everything felt compressed and intense and mostly we were going crazy trying to make the film, Juliet said.

  Something Sara had seen previously, in a photograph, sprang to life: older boys in pink leotards with ribbons dangling from them tossed juggling pins and wandered around the perimeter of a brown square of tarpaulin spread on the ground. A scrim of blue canvas was mounted behind them. A lean, olive-complexioned man in a khaki vest stepped back from a tripod-mounted camera as a human pyramid of girls in white outfits dismantled itself; the girl at the top, whose feet had waved alongside her ears, unwound first one leg then the other in a graceful arc, her feet resting briefly on the torso of the girl beneath her before she jumped free. So at ease in her body, seemingly at ease, even languid. And so extraordinarily flexible. Raymond Renaud, red ball cap on his head, sunglasses shielding his eyes, turned, separated himself from the children and the photographer, and waved.

  The photographer’s name is Paolo Sabatini, Italian but shooting for a Dutch magazine, Juliet said, and he was only there for a couple of days. There was an Italian sociologist studying the circus, but he didn’t really interact with anyone, just sat around taking notes, so I don’t know how much use he’d be. There were always people around, always people observing him. Apart from when we interviewed him and once when we went out to dinner, I don’t think I ever saw him alone. And he let me film what I wanted, where and when I wanted.

  Can you pass on Justin’s email or phone number to me?

  Sure
, Juliet said.

  Behind Raymond Renaud’s back, the teenaged boys patted one another’s shoulders with carefree bonhomie and the girl contortionist walked with an effortless stride toward them.

  That’s Gelila Melesse, Juliet said, pointing to the contortionist. And Alem and Dawit and Kebede Gebremariam. Do they look — ? I don’t know, I don’t know what I see when I look at them now.

  Sara peered at them. As the photo shoot came to an end, Juliet stopped the tape, extracted it from the player’s mouth, and fed in another from her pile.

  Sara had a sudden impression that Juliet didn’t want to be doing this.

  In an echoey hall of painted cinder blocks, Raymond huddled with a quartet of girls, including Gelila, demonstrating something with his arms. Two of the girls made their way into backbends, while Raymond seemed to be discussing with Gelila and the other girl how the two of them would balance atop the bodies of first two. With one hand, Raymond adjusted the feet of one of the arched girls, as if to secure her weight, then touched his fingers to the back of her ribs as if to nudge the curve of her spine higher. His manner seemed kind but exacting, as if he had a clear idea what he wanted.

  Isn’t it natural for there to be some kind of touch when you’re doing physical training like this? Juliet said.

  I guess so.

  A kitchen, a room with yellow walls: three younger boys sat at a table covered in dirty dishes eating what looked like bread and jam and chatting in Amharic.

  Is this his house? Sara asked.

  Juliet nodded.

  And the boys live there?

  Three of them do. But there are almost always other kids staying over or coming to use his computer or get help with schoolwork or playing in the courtyard.

  The camera swung across the room, and Raymond looked up from stirring a pot on the stove.

  Where do the boys sleep, or any of them sleep when they’re there?

  They have a bedroom. If there’s too many, then on mats on the floor. Or the sofa. He said something about how they need a proper address to get registered in school.