Free The Ravine by Paul Quarrington

she is withdrawn and a bit sullen (except with her friends) and takes an enormous amount of time to perform even the simplest task. Currer is not without sweetness; if there is trouble or sadness she is quick with a comforting hug and a whispered “I love you.” But left to her own devices, she would rather drift around the planet with earphones plugged in, dexterously manipulating the buttons on her portable music player, getting the machine to repeat favourite tracks and to avoid ones that fail to meet her standards. Her music of choice is, quite frankly, dreck, but this is an age-old generational battle, and needn’t be gotten into here. Currer does, I will say in her defence, adore the music of her Uncle Jay. We have gone to see Jay play on a few occasions, mostly when the owners of Birds of a Feather have ordered him to do matinees. Currer has sat stone-still for the entire performance, nursing a Coca-Cola, a look of rapture on her face.
    Ellis has been to those same matinees, of course. She is not enthralled by her uncle’s music, although on the few occasions whenshe knows the tune—“Over the Rainbow,” for example—she will sing along with ear-splitting enthusiasm. Curiously, seeing as many of the people in my family are musical—my mother had her grade eight piano and a lovely voice—Ellis appears to be singing-impaired. She hollers out notes at random, or with a profound attraction to quarter-tones. She is quite good, though, on the more showbizzy aspects of singing, twisting her body with rhythmic abandon and occasionally calling out, “Everybody!” When she does this, of course, everybody obediently joins in.
    Currer has a lovely voice, although she is loath to use it. Currer will sing—with Ellis’s encouragement—at bedtime, when our custom is to belt out a rousing version of “The Window.” I know, because I used to overhear it (standing outside the doorway with my heart banging inside my ribcage), that their mother sings them actual lullabies, quiet serenades, even the occasional hymn. So the girls are used to music after they’ve scurried under the sheets, although “The Window” is hardly a peaceful air. I take up the banjo from its position in a shadowy corner and thrum out a few introductory changes. I don’t know how it is that I can play the banjo, but somewhere along the line I acquired a few chords and a rudimentary strumming technique. “The Window” is not that complicated a song, at any rate, and is boisterous enough to forgive all sorts of mispickings. I learned “The Window” from a record by a group named Troutfishing in America. It is a long song wherein a number of well-known nursery rhymes are recited, except that at the end of each there is the same sharp, stinging departure, which has to do with violent defenestration:
    Georgy Porgy, pudding’n’pie
,
Kissed the girls and made them cry.

And when the boys came out to play
,
They threw him out the window.

(everybody now)

The window, the window, they threw him out the window
…
When the boys came out to play
,
They threw him out the window.
    Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard
,
To get her poor doggy a bone
,
But when she bent over, the doggy took over
,
And threw her out the window.

(everybody now)

The window, the window, he threw her out the

window… etc.
    Currer sings with the tranquil intensity of a chorister; Ellis hollers like a drunken lumberjack in the advanced throes of cabin fever. She is so unmusical that I would suspect Ronnie of infidelity, except that Ellis is clearly my child; the tips of her little fingers are bent inward and her eyes are brown and very weak, so that she, too, is saddled with spectacles. Besides which, I don’t believe Ronnie was ever unfaithful during our marriage, so it’s unfair to raise the accusation even in jest. (Don’t think it has escaped my attention that Veronica has popped up twice in the past couple of paragraphs. She is certainly banging on the door of this