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CBC LITERARY AWARDS

For over 20 years, CBC Radio has celebrated the best of Canadian writing talent. For a third year enRoute is proud to sponsor the CBC Literary Awards / Prix littéraires Radio-Canada by publishing the winning texts in English and French. Watch for award-winning short fiction and poetry in upcoming issues.

The views expressed by the writers do not represent the views of enRoute, Spafax or Air Canada. Certain readers may be offended by the contents.

Second Prize
Fiction

VERTIGO AND THE SEX QUEEN

Text: JANICE McCACHEN

1 | 2 | 3 | JUN '04

It begins after the birth of our first child. Lying in bed at night and seeing myself pitching over precipice after precipice, losing my grip on her. The cliffs on Dallas Road, the breakwater at Ship’s Point, the concrete steps that lead to our front door. "There are only eight steps," says my husband.

"Yes," I say, "but feel her skull. Don’t press. See this spot? Here where the pulse shows, where the cranium is still divided into right brain and left? Think of the impact of a fall, a blow to the right side. Poetry and music gone forever. Only capable of logical thought. She’d have to become an accountant."

"At least we’d have one in the family. She’ll look after our investment portfolios," he says and rolls to the convex side of the futon. I know I am being completely unreasonable but when I close my eyes the dizziness starts again.

Three years later, in Paris, we move into a tiny two-room apartment on the sixth floor of a nineteenth century building in the sixth arrondissement. The long winding staircase is so narrow we have to take the sofabed apart to get it up the stairs. My husband is writing a book on counterpoint development in pre-Baroque French music. He wants to rent a piano so the landlord suggests we have it moved in with a crane through the balcony. We know enough to triple the estimate of the movers and decide on an electric keyboard. Besides, I keep picturing the smashed ivory and splintered black wood all over the boulevard when the balcony collapses from the weight of the baby grand. This balcony, three feet by two feet, leans out precariously above the chestnut trees that line the Boulevard Arago. It is accessed through rotting French doors and metal shutters held fast by a rusty deadbolt. Our three-year-old, Sara, is forbidden even to touch the deadbolt, much less venture onto the balcony to peer between the wrought iron railings. Even on April evenings, when the chestnut trees are festooned with pink and white blossoms that hang like bunches of grapes, I can barely bring myself to stand on it. Sometimes, lured out as I am by the sounds of the people who spill out of the cinema and fill up the terrace of the Cafe Pleasant across the street, I go so far as to open the shutters. Then I lie on the sofa and let the night noises, muffled by the trees, float up and in. A far-off crowd in a dream.

Inside me, the second grows. She gets used to the spiraling descent and ascent as I leave and return from work each day. On the fifty-sixth floor of the Montparnasse Tower, I give English lessons to businessmen who deal in heavy metals and to secretaries who want to come up in the world. They tell me that in a moderate wind, the tower sways so much that a pencil will roll off a desk. One man points to the place in the ceiling where Algerian terrorists once planted a bomb. "The police were, do you say, tipped up," he explains, "and they search it out before it explode." Another woman tells me, with gestures and drawings, of a boy who jumped from the rooftop garden, how she saw him fly past when she was typing a letter. "Here," she says and points to a spot on the enormous window. Beyond there is only the smoggy yellow sky, an inversion, and the faint outline of the dome of Sacre Coeur. I want to ask her whether she knows if he jumped or fell but the linguistic distinction is still beyond her.

Inside, the new child strains and pummels at me. One day, in the elevator on the way down from my lesson, I feel something wet. I check in the washroom of the lobby and sure enough, there is blood. At only three months, this one wants out. The obstetrician gives me hormone pills and advises me to stay home and avoid the stairs for a week."Gravity is everything," she warns. "Stay off your feet."

1 | 2 | 3 | JUN '04