It's a Song and a Book

If PJ Harvey has a signature song, it’s ‘Down By The Water’ from the 1995 album To Bring You My Love. I’ve only seen her perform live twice, but on each occasion the unaccompanied words ‘I lost my heart …’ – pitched B, D, E, E - evoked a sort of sigh that went around the auditorium in anticipation of the cathartic ritual of drama and death to come. The song allows the maestra to be as menacing and haunted as she likes (and as everyone else likes, too). She makes jokey references to it, posing with large and small trinket boxes decorated with fish for a photo which has long since disappeared from her Instagram feed. She tries to defuse its power at the same time as acknowledging it.

'Down By The Water' is the Harvey track the Goth world knows best, too. It was the only song of hers my friend Cylene remembered when I asked her – ‘it finishes, little fish, big fish, or something?’ It’s found its way onto compilation CDs and has been covered, more or less pointlessly, by a variety of other artists.

‘Some people think my lyrics are autobiographical to the extent they’ll listen to ‘Down By The Water’ and believe I have actually given birth to a child and drowned her under a bridge’ Harvey complained in 2005. Because that’s what it’s about. Or is it? Like so much of her output, it’s more concerned with mood than narrative. An act of watery filicide makes sense, but how old is the child? When the protagonist sings ‘That blue-eyed girl/Became blue-eyed whore’, is she foreseeing the future, or mourning the past? As a song is composed, clarity takes a back seat to the demands of rhyme and metre, and what emerges can be something more ambiguous and open-ended. In the video that accompanied the single, shot by Harvey’s friend Maria Mochnacz, the singer twists and cavorts underwater in a massive black wig and a dress in the courtesan’s red silk, writing herself visually into the song. There’s a lot going on there, more than Harvey would ever want to recognise in as many words.

This weekend found me doing something very unusual – reading a modern thriller (curiously my bedtime book is The Big Sleep, but that’s quite a different matter). Paula Hawkins is very successful, and probably quite prosperous after her last bestseller, The Girl on the Train, was made into a movie; her second novel is called Into the Water, and is written in temptingly short, punchy chapters from the viewpoint of different characters. You wouldn’t describe it as Gothic, although it could be made such by a so-inclined adaptor, because at the centre of the plot is a site in a fictional Northumbrian town called Beckford, the Drowning Pool, where over the centuries a remarkable number of women – always women – have met their ends. They’ve been witches being ‘swum’, suicides, or murdered wives. Most recent in the sequence is Nel, reporter, photographer and writer, who has herself become obsessed by the past of the Drowning Pool and its ‘swimmers’ and who, it becomes clear, is enmeshed in the mysteries, enmities and hatreds not only of her own family but also the community around them. Reading Into the Water is not so much like ‘piecing together a jigsaw’ as watching someone else do it, at some speed. It’s hardly demanding, but isn’t completely vacuous, dealing with the hazards of memory and intention, of history and place, woven around its central motif – of women drowning.

On page 220, Nel’s sister Jules, now living in the family home she hates to look after her teenage niece Lena, describes how

I collapsed, drifting in and out of dreams until I heard the door go downstairs, Lena’s footsteps on the stairs. I heard her going into her room and turning her music on, loud enough for me to hear a woman singing.

That blue-eyed girl

Said ‘No more,’

That blue-eyed girl

Became blue-eyed whore.

… When I woke again the music was still playing, the same song … I wanted it to stop, was desperate for it to stop … I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, but I heard the woman singing still.

Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water –

Come back here, man, gimme my daughter.

Half the characters in the book could have sung along with Harvey; it could be that Ms Hawkins merely Googled (as I experimented with doing) ‘songs about drowning in water female singer’ and found ‘Down By The Water’ that way, as it’s the first example that comes up, but it locks the book together suspiciously well: a disturbing, inconclusive lyric, heard as if in a dream.

Of course, as we know, nothing Polly Harvey has ever done is consciously ‘feminist’. But whatever’s going on in her imaginary lament, it doesn’t emerge ex nihilo. The whoredom and drowning has a context; however we read it, there’s a hinterland of sexuality and power. Where’s the girl’s father? Why does her mother feel this way about her? That’s what makes ‘Down By The Water’ perfect as a baleful summary of this book, however Ms Hawkins came across it. As Lena, who plays the song, comments to her aunt, ‘I don’t understand people like you, who always choose to blame the woman. If there’s two people doing something wrong and one of them’s a girl, it’s got to be her fault, right? … Why does the wife always hate the other woman? Why doesn’t she hate her husband? … Why isn’t he the one who gets shoved off a fucking cliff?’