One of the presents given to Cathy at the party was a cardboard music box with a jolly yellow duck and a birthday-card message on the front, and with a little crank on one side: when you turned the crank it played a tinny rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” And when Warren came back to the flat that night he found it, among several other cheap, forgotten toys, on the floor beneath Cathy’s stripped bed. He played it once or twice as he sat drinking whiskey over the strewn books and papers on his desk; then, with a child’s sense of pointless experiment, he turned the crank the other way and played it backwards, slowly. And once he’d begun doing that he found he couldn’t stop, or didn’t want to, because the dim, rude little melody it made suggested all the loss and loneliness in the world.