Accusation Read Online Free Page B

the children, and he’s great on film.
    Sara was still trying to get her head around the idea of timid Juliet in Ethiopia, not to mention Juliet shooting a film there. So is this for your show?
    Oh, no, Juliet said. That’s over. I’ve approached various broadcasters. And funders. And everyone seems to totally love the story of him and the circus, and I’m hoping to make a feature. I can’t quite believe it, but I am. And it’s all thanks to you. Because if you hadn’t told me about this.
    There was no reason to feel jealous. Sara did not feel jealous, yet there was a twang of some kind. She had handed this story to Juliet. It was not her kind of story. And here was Juliet, effervescent and joyous, running with it; Juliet had run all the way to Addis Ababa, a city where Sara had never been and where she had trouble imagining the Juliet Levin she knew, with her neat and beautiful outfits and nervousness and downtown life, contending with bad roads and wonky electricity and all that was wild and unpredictable about a city in the developing world, the sort of place that had until recently been part of Sara’s life until she had chosen to step away from it. So more power to Juliet. She had wanted to offer Juliet a gift and she’d succeeded.
    Were you anywhere other than Addis?
    Mostly Addis. They have a rehearsal space on the outskirts of the city, so we spent a lot of time there, then travelled south with them on tour, which gives me this built-in narrative. And everyone loves him there. You should see. Children flock to him, and people in the communities are so thrilled by the whole idea. One guy was calling circus the new religion. NGOs are mad about the work he’s doing. Everyone says how transformative it’s been.
    And the benefit?
    He’s going to be there. There’s a North American tour in the works now, and he’s trying to raise money for that, and more awareness here generally. You should come and meet him.
    How expensive is it?
    Tickets are a hundred dollars. I think.
    Knowing that the odds of seeing David were slim, Sara had planned to go out for drinks with friends. If Juliet had once known when her birthday was, she, too, seemed to have forgotten, as Sara had forgotten Juliet’s, other than that it was, she thought, sometime in March. She felt no great need to meet the circus founder, despite Juliet’s excitement, yet maybe the thing to do for her birthday was go to the circus. She had never seen any of the high-tech acrobatic performances of the Cirque, which had started out, she knew, as a gang of stilt-walkers and fire-jugglers bewitching crowds on Montreal street corners, back in the days when she and Juliet had been students there. Perhaps their early shows were not unlike what the Ethiopian children did. Going to the circus could be a way to embrace youthfulness, which wasn’t a bad thing when you were on the road to forty, and supporting the children’s circus was undeniably a good thing.
    His amplified voice was the first thing that met Sara as she slipped into the back of the reception tent, late for the pre-show talk. Two tents, a smaller one and the big top, had been raised by the side of the lake in a west-end parking lot. He was standing at one end of an airy room, raised on a small platform, in front of a microphone and podium, the tent’s thick canvas soughing in a breeze, traffic distantly surging, the scree-scree of gulls ricocheting down from the sky. She made her way along the side of a crowd of men and women in fine suits and shiny dresses, hands clutching wineglasses, in order to see him better, and there, from the front of the room, above the heads of the crowd, rose the furry pelt of a sound boom: someone, presumably Juliet, was filming him.
    You have to understand a phenomenon that people there call ferengi hysteria, Raymond Renaud was saying. In my time I have travelled a lot and I have been a foreigner in many places, but I never experienced anything like the level of street