Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  And wasn’t setting off in the wake of war and insurgency into southern Iraq, as they had done, or northern Iraq, as she’d done with three other female journalists a year before their trip to the south, a greater madness than crossing the globe in the hope of a conversation with those you weren’t sure were going to speak to you, which was surely no madder than balancing on the shoulders of two bodies balanced on three bodies balanced upon four bodies before leaping into the air in a somersaulting dive.

  The day before, Rafael had met Sara at Tullamarine Airport, shorter and stockier than she remembered, without the beard he’d had in Iraq, partly a stranger yet they’d hugged like the old friends they also were. From the airport, he’d driven them straight to the beach, her exhaustion catching on the domes of the palm trees and in the corona of the sun, for it was summer in Melbourne, and after coffee at a beachside café they’d walked into the salty, delirious water of the bay and Rafael had said, I’m still so very angry, I go out, I’m off to East Timor again next week, I see things, I come back and I’m still angry, that people here haven’t seen the things I’ve seen makes me angry, and I box but I stay angry, and Sara had said, I’m not here because I’m angry, all I want is to hear what they’re willing to say and bear witness to it somehow.

  They may not tell you the truth.

  They may not be able to tell me the truth, whatever it is. I do know that.

  A wave had burst and sloshed about their thighs.

  Back at Rafael’s apartment, she’d slept for hours and hours, waking sometime late in the evening only to fall asleep again on the futon on the floor of his spare room, a greater exhaustion gripping her, and came to consciousness in the afternoon to the sound of Rafael hammering away at a keyboard on the far side of the wall, his collection of weight-lifting equipment, barbells and dumbbells, scattered around her.

  She’d roused herself, made them each a cup of tea in Rafael’s small kitchen, showered, read the newspaper that Rafael offered her, made more tea, and cooked herself some scrambled eggs. Rafael, still at his computer table in the lounge, insisted he wasn’t hungry.

  I lost a man in the midst of all this, Sara called to him from the kitchen, scooping the eggs onto a piece of toast, and there was freedom and necessity in being able to summon up David this way. Not exactly because of this, though somehow it got entangled.

  Had it been going on a while?

  A while. She leaned in the doorway between the two rooms as Rafael looked up from his work. Since shortly after our trip to Najaf. But it had to end.

  So then I’m sorry and not sorry.

  An hour or so after that, the doorbell had rung, and Rafael opened the door of the flat to a petite, coffee-skinned, dark-haired young woman. Imagined Louise vanished in a puff of dust. An effervescence, a darting busyness to her like a hummingbird, arms bare in a sleeveless shirt. She said she was off to pick up the younger ones from their billets in her ute. If you drop by around half-nine or ten? We should be through or nearly through. You can meet everybody then.

  Sara stepped forward to join them in the doorway, and Rafael made the introductions. Louise, Sara. Sara, Louise. The clasp of Louise’s warm, small hand. Her quick, inquisitive gaze. She said thanks, but she wouldn’t step in. Rafael touched Louise’s arm as he closed the door.

  She dropped by to check me out, Sara said as Rafael pulled a bag of pistachios and another of rice crackers from a cupboard and a slab of cheese and two cans of beer from the fridge and, tucking everything under his arms except for one can of beer, which he handed to Sara, opened the sliding door that led outside. Raf, let me carry something else —

  Yeah, she probably sort of was.

  From her seat on the patio, Sara drew a pistachio from the bowl of accumulating shells, cracked it with her teeth, and pried free the green fruit. I have a confession to make —

  A confession, Sara?

  Three nights ago, no wait, whatever it was, two nights before I left, I got a phone call in the middle of the night. I thought it was going to be you, but it was this man, this strange man, one of my contacts in Ethiopia, the whistleblower from the orphanage. With some new news.

  Which she told Rafael.

  What did you do?

  I made one phone call. Is that reprehensible?

  To?

  A police contact, RCMP, someone I’ve spoken to about international pedophile rings, and I sent an email to the foreign desk editor at the paper, outlining what I knew and saying I was going to be out of town and out of reach for a week. And that’s all I did.

  You didn’t tell them where you were going?

  No.

  You won’t check email?

  Not today, anyway. She’d written Sheila, copied Alan, passed on Gerard’s name and the Calgary number, the number of the police contact, and all the information Gerard had passed on to her about Mark Templeton and the new orphanage in Tanzania, presumed Sheila, or Alan, would do something with what she’d handed to them, she’d given them enough information to do something. In addition to which she had a hunch that Gerard Loftus would not let the matter rest until he knew for certain that word was out or Mark Templeton’s plans were thwarted.

  Carry-on bag packed, she’d sent off the email in the hour before the taxi arrived to take her to the airport for a Thursday evening flight to Los Angeles. Also, an email to Nuala on the national desk, saying she’d been unexpectedly called out of town.

  You could have told me, Rafael said, stubbing out his cigarette. Let me break the story.

  I couldn’t leave and do nothing. You wouldn’t have either. I’m telling you now.

  Will he tell anyone else?

  I don’t know. I can’t speak to what he’ll do. He’s a bit of a wild card. You can follow up or move on it tomorrow. If you want. But I needed to see this thing through, I don’t know, unimpeded.

  In an hour or so we should head out.

  Louise did say one of them would speak to me?

  What she said was she’d talked to them about it. No one’s making any promises.

  Did she tell them I was a journalist?

  I said you were a friend, journalist, you’d seen the circus, written about it, spoken to him. She knows pretty much what happened. I said you’d come all this way because you wanted to hear their side of the story.

  The privilege of being able to do what she had done felt acute, charging a flight that she couldn’t really afford to a credit card, knowing that whatever else happened, she’d be able to work up a travel piece to pay for it. The ease with which she’d travelled to LA, then on to Sydney, then the connecting flight to Melbourne, despite the journey’s length. Stepping through immigration control with a passport easy to travel on, in this case visa-less. No one had asked if she had a police record and in the eyes of the law, hers had been eradicated. How radically different her experience was from that of the asylum seekers, stuck in their legal limbo. Or even that of the hijackers, their names released the day before, whose violent attempt to get to Australia had taken 125 others down with them even if 50 had survived.

  Shall we go out for dinner? Rafael was asking. Where are you on food, or are you too discombobulated to know?

  Let me take you out for dinner.

  How about Ethiopian over in Footscray?

  Ethiopian, really?

  There’s a few along near where we’ll be. I took Louise and some of the gang to one the other week. They’re cheap.

  If you want. Whatever you want. Only I’d love another quick shower first, if that’s not too decadent.

  Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

  In the shower, Sara shook shampoo into her palm from a small, yellow-tinted bottle that, to judge by its label, Rafael had snatched from a hotel in Dubai, worked the liquid into her hair under a stream of hot water, and thought about forgiveness. What was it, a word that spread in many directions. You extended it to others if you felt they’d done something wrong, and wanted others to ask you for it if they’d done something wrong or you felt the
y’d done something wrong. Or you asked others for it if you’d done something wrong, or felt you’d done something wrong. And you attempted to extend it to yourself.

  There was no way back to before, before you or anyone had done whatever it was. The teenagers were in their own particular limbo, legally neither one thing or another, in so many ways neither one thing or another. They couldn’t go back to before whatever had happened between them and Raymond Renaud, that harm or their awareness of possible harm. Any more than he, or she, or anyone, could go back to the state of being un-accused. Something had happened. They had all been changed by it. By him. He’d pushed her back into her own past. And what was there to hope for now: the possibility of being released from the hold of the past, however outwardly large or small its traumas. To be able to re-enter the past without being returned to the you, and only the you, who’d been damaged in the past. To be able to look back and move forward.

  In a wrinkled skirt and linen shirt and sandals, Sara stepped from the spare room into the hall to find Rafael exiting the bathroom in a patterned shirt that looked to have been ironed, an aura of aftershave about him. The risks of unintended harm lay everywhere. And hope. Oh, life, what was there but the risk of it.

  Outside, climbing in on the left side of his little hatchback, she waited for Rafael to enter the driver’s side on the right, a row of palm trees parading along the wide, nearly suburban road, the grass losing its emerald hue as the light retreated, the rumble of trams, as they were called here, borne from farther off. And there was the moon — Raf, the moon! — rising not in the south but the north, waxing not from the left but from the right, so many things here an inversion of the known.

  At the bottom of her leather knapsack, in its little grey plastic case, was a tape, the last tape that Juliet had shot of Raymond with the boys over dinner in his kitchen. The boy in his arms, on his lap. In the bar that night, Juliet had insisted that she didn’t want the tapes back. You keep them. Or don’t. Do whatever you want with them. Destroy them, I don’t care. The plastic case pressed against Sara’s foot. Somewhere on that tape he was forever and forever embracing the boy. An offering, depending on what they said. Maybe it could be used to bolster their cause. Or not. Depending on what they said. Whichever way things went, it would be an ambiguous offering.

  From the freeway, the towers of the central city jutted up like scabbards across the river, a bridge bearing them up and over the water, the anticipatory sky ahead of them pinking, the teenagers so close. The night before Sara had left home, she’d received an email from Soraya Green, saying, If you’re open to it, there’s someone, a man, a photojournalist who recently moved here from Chile, who I’d like to introduce you to.

  She hadn’t responded yet but the invitation rode with her, along with the words that she would write back: I’m open to it.

  Don’t look at the moon through glass, Rafael said. That’s what my grandmother used to say, but how the hell are you supposed to avoid looking at the moon through glass? And never leave a hat on the bed.

  I’m always looking at the moon through glass.

  Well then we’re screwed, you and me both. He rolled down the driver’s side window and the wind bashed in and the moon swung in the air beyond his shoulder.

  On an extending street of two-storey Victorian buildings, painted lighter, brighter colours than those at home, some with ornate cornices, some with no more than plain rectangular signs for low-rent businesses, a discount furniture shop, a pawnbroker, legal services, Rafael pulled up just past a row of little triangular flags, yellow, red, green, the Ethiopian colours, strung across the top of the Little Lalibela restaurant, its frontage shining amid a motley row of blinking, illuminated signs. With a squeak of the emergency brake, he rooted the car in place.

  Or we can do Chinese, he said. In front of them, on a vertical sign, yellow pictograms fell down a red backdrop. I confess, there’s nothing terribly fancy in these parts.

  Whatever you want, Raf. I’m not very hungry, but I’d love some coffee. Can we get a good cup of coffee around here?

  They entered a dim room filled with small tables and metal-framed chairs that might have belonged in an office, the air tinged with frankincense. A couple of Ethiopian men sat at a table over bottles of beer. To the woman who came to take their order, Rafael introduced himself as the man who’d been in the week before with a young woman and the Ethiopian teenagers.

  Oh, yes, said the woman, folding her arms with lively authority, Yes, yes, yes, I remember it. The big table, the circus.

  The circus, Sara thought.

  Rafael introduced her as his friend from Canada. Sara’s been to Ethiopia and she’s seen the circus. Now, this may be utterly unorthodox, but you think we can have the coffee, the Ethiopian coffee, yeah, at the same time as our food?

  Really? You have? Okay, for no one else will I do it but for you.

  You’ll see me here every week, every night then. Well, nearly every night. You saw them perform, didn’t you? Rafael went on. Somewhere here, at some kind of community event?

  At the Timkat celebration, the woman said. And by the grace of God I hope they stay.

  Minutes later, she wafted a small clay pot of incense beneath their noses, and set a bowl of popcorn on the table, and a small charcoal brazier over which she heated green beans in a flat little pan. Somehow she made space on the table for the wide tin plate of injera and meat that Rafael had ordered, and the coffee, drunk in three rounds out of small handle-less clay cups. For the first time, Sara began to feel the dead man truly settle. Raymond Renaud was loosening his hold with the approach of the living.

  Rafael said, Louise says the youngest two, Alem and Tewodros, have discovered skateboarding. She brought them a skateboard she found at an opportunity shop and now it’s all they want to do. So maybe they’ll work it into their show. You have to understand about Louise. She’s become an advocate, and she’s looking for help, and like I said, she’s got this plan for a circus school with some mates, and for going out into communities with the whole social circus thing, and working with this gang is part of it. Did I give a toss about circuses before this? The answer is no. Am I a convert to the idea of circuses as a transnational and transcultural means of communication and circus arts as a way, ah, of working through trauma? Possibly. Is it obvious that I’m a little in love with the lovely Louise?

  Yes, Sara said. And good luck with that.

  I may need it.

  Raf, you’re a catch. Get yourself on a trapeze and you’ll be fine.

  In the dark, partway along another wide tract of street, beside a Catholic services centre, Rafael pulled into a parking space in front of a small brick warehouse with a garage door covering its front like a wide, closed mouth, and wedged his car between what was presumably Louise’s aging utility vehicle and an older sedan. The metal panels of the garage door were painted brown. On the wall to one side, above an ordinary door, a floodlit yet unassuming sign read Footscray Gymnastics Club. Once Rafael switched the engine off, music lifted toward them through the garage door, the jangle of guitar, plucked bass, the reedy swoop of saxophone, a line of melody that burst along then cut out.

  Am I mad, Raf?

  No madder than the rest of us.

  Sara checked the interior of her bag: her audio recorder, the little Hi8 tape that had been Juliet’s, her notepad, her camera, a pen. Maybe none of these would be needed. And maybe nothing would be learned tonight, it would take time, she had a bit of time, and whatever they offered would have to be enough. And they would all find their way onward.

  She and Rafael made their way to the door, where after tugging on the locked handle, Rafael gave the metal surface a couple of sharp raps.

  An Ethiopian boy, in T-shirt and sweatpants, opened it, bashful, a wrangle of limbs. He ducked his head of longish, curly hair and mumbled something, and Rafael leaned close, canting toward the boy before turning. Alem, Sara. Sara, Alem. Gaze still lowered, Alem held out his hand, and Sara shook it, aw
are of the energy of bodies and voices and movement behind him, the air thick with the smells of sweat and chalk.

  An archipelago of running shoes and sandals and flip-flops extended in front of them, and as the musicians started up again and a reverberation of amplified sound hit them, Sara slipped her heels free of her sandals, and Rafael tugged off his running shoes, reduced to greying socks. Beside the shoes: two skateboards. To her left, behind two small amps, were three young men: saxophonist, guitarist, and bass player. The saxophone and bass players she recognized from the show in Copenhagen, and from Juliet’s tapes. They stopped at the end of their riff, leaving an amplified buzz in their wake, as if they’d just taken in the arrival of strangers. She lifted a hand in greeting and they nodded. The guitar player, not familiar, was also Ethiopian. He’s from here, Rafael said. And there was Senayit, the singer, Gelila’s friend, in sweatpants and T-shirt, a red kerchief over her hair, sitting on a bench against the far, mirrored wall, chugging from a plastic water bottle.

  Alem, who had picked up a set of white juggling balls from the floor, was speaking into the ear of a girl around his age, also in trackpants and T-shirt like Senayit and the boys. Beside them, an older teenaged boy in a fedora kept his own juggling balls in motion, until, with a shout from the girl, Alem began to circle his four balls, and from behind the taller, fedora-wearing boy, the girl grabbed one of his white balls as it rose upward and passed it to Alem, then caught one of Alem’s and passed it to the older boy, who was a moustache-less Kebede. They were real, and they were here. And they were aware of being watched. How could they not be? What was she to them? Their desires being so different from hers.

  A sea of blue mats spread behind the jugglers, beneath the caged lamps that hung in a row from the high ceiling. In the middle of the long and narrow room, a body flew in a somersaulting dive over the head and outstretched hands of another: two more Ethiopian teenagers worked with two non-Ethiopian young men. And these were Tewodros and Dawit, Rafael said. And the girl juggler was Nazanette. The whoop of voices. Louise called and waved from the far end of the room, where a figure, in tights, Gelila — it had to be Gelila — balanced upside down on one hand atop a tower of bricks. Louise was spotting her. As they approached along the mats, Gelila began to reverse herself, lowered her legs slowly to the ground without losing her balance or disturbing the bricks, more extraordinary than ever in her extreme flexibility and fluid calm. Upright, she shook herself out, hair still in its tumbling little braids, though she looked leaner, having lost an adolescent plushness that she’d had when Juliet had filmed her. She wiped her chalked hands over her black tights. Even on tape, she’d had such self-composure, which her actual presence made more ripply and intense.