Free Accusation by Catherine Bush Page A

like to do. Juggle in unexpected places. Sometimes I carry a set of juggling balls and sometimes I use whatever I can find. When I was in Sri Lanka —
    When were you in Sri Lanka?
    Ninety —
    I was there in ninety-one, covering the civil war.
    We just missed each other.
    Were you teaching? What was it like being there when you were, I imagine, quite tense.
    I was on a break. A friend worked there. In an orphanage. So I went for some weeks. I went north and east, into Tamil territory, because I’d heard the beaches near Trincomalee were beautiful. There were a lot of soldiers. And armed rebels. I’d get off a bus and juggle. Or I’d go to the market and pick up fruit, breadfruit, mangosteens. Sometimes I juggled in front of the soldiers. Or the rebels. Once I juggled with street cones. It is about showing people an unexpected thing. Creating an anomalous situation. Which I also tried to do in Addis Ababa. And this, tonight. It’s about changing things even briefly, because people are distracted. I like watching children be enthralled by something like this, when they are not sure what to think or why you, the outsider, are doing this thing. The expected interaction is overturned. If I give out money until I have nothing, it will not change a thing.
    How did the soldiers or the rebels react to your juggling?
    He gave another grin. They didn’t kill me.
    She told him that she had spent most of her time there travelling with soldiers, remembered driving past long stands of palm trees with the tops of their heads blown off. He, too, said he remembered palm trees with the tops of their heads blown off. A transport trailer, lit by the gemlike reflectors along its bulk, seemed to elongate as she passed it. Were you teaching before you went over there?
    In Canada. In the north. Then I decided to take some time to travel.
    And, after, did you have a plan to go to Africa, or go back there?
    I applied for jobs in international schools. It was chance. I got the one in Addis. And you, he said, brushing crumbs or sugar from his knees, did you set off to be a reporter in faraway places?
    I didn’t really set out to do anything. I was trying to escape some things that happened in Montreal. I was in a relationship that ended. We were supposed to get married. And then a woman accused me of stealing her wallet and using her credit card. Which I didn’t do. But I was charged and it went to trial, and that was a very long process. And the man I was with, I trusted him to support me, I wanted him to be a character witness in court, I didn’t have a proper alibi, he was the closest thing I had, but he wouldn’t do it.
    She was startled to hear herself saying this because it was not the version of events that she usually told, and she had never spoken of these matters in exactly this way. There was still pain in mentioning the particular form of Graham’s betrayal. She had never told anyone at work about the trial; Juliet Levin was really the only person among her Toronto acquaintances who knew of it. David didn’t.
    Why wouldn’t he help? asked the man in the car with her, and his attention was keen and felt like velvet. If he had been sleeping before, he was now alert. Why had she told him this? Because he had opened himself to her about the boy. Because she’d watched him juggle, seen beauty in him as well as distress. Because by then a cord of intimacy stretched between them.
    He didn’t want to be made public in this way. He’d been my professor. He taught, he teaches modern American history. We met in a class of his. It sounds so sordid now to say it. I think he was genuinely in love with me. He asked me to marry him. And I was madly in love with him. But in the end he turned pragmatic. He was coming up for tenure and he didn’t want this thing that was happening to me to jeopardize it. I became a liability.
    Why did the woman who accused you think you did it?
    How dark it was outside: there were no cars in sight, no headlights