Notes on a Drowning by Laura Woollett
Laura Elizabeth Woollett lives in Melbourne. Her work has appeared in Contrary, Mascara (#9), Page Seventeen, and Wet Ink, among other publications. She studies at the University of Melbourne and is a fiction subeditor for Voiceworks.
Notes on a Drowning
Death is beautiful when you are a virgin.
Death is beautiful when you are aggrieved.
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What does a maiden know about fucking?
What does a maiden know about…anything?
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‘Let me lay my head across your lap’, he said, in the floodlit theatre. The show had not yet begun.
My modesty was pink as ham, eglantine, lady-parts. I caught his mother’s eye.
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Some things are never quite right. Some flowers are destined to grow the wrong way.
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My dress blazes white. Sun strains behind the clouds. I am liquid like white sun, lilting dream songs under pale skies.
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‘She always liked mermaids! She always smelt of fish! Oho, a veritable fishwife!’ (Horatio)
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Under dream skies. In sepia woods. I am sun-bleached, unplucked. Plucking flowers like I know what it is all about.
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Art criticism: ‘Mr. Millais’s Ophelia…makes us think of a dairymaid in a frolic’ (The Times). ‘Why the mischief should you not paint pure nature, and not that rascally wirefenced garden-rolled-nursery-maid’s paradise?’ (John Ruskin).
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Tumbled like a dairymaid. My white skirts spread wide. Afloat on a sea of grass, I watch the starlings skimming. In my half-open hand: a tangled prize.
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Hug me, Gertrude, I have no Mommy. Kiss me, Gertrude, I love your son.
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Air-tide ripple. Post-meridian dim. I rise from one dream to plunge into another, watery and willow-swept.
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‘O, my philia! Stars burn in my codpiece! Hear my celestial groaning!’ (A letter from the dirty prince)
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Poor Lizzie has caught a chill! In the artist’s studio. Look at Lizzie Siddal: pale-lipped, wet-browed. Ophelia in a claw-foot bathtub.
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‘If I must die, let it be by water, that most poetic of elements’ (The author at nineteen).
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To my eyes, all flowers have the look of sea foam. My eyes, swimming in sweet salt tears.
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‘When a victim is submerged at the time of death, it is normal for their eyes to maintain a glistening, lifelike appearance’ (A forensic science manual).
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I fill my lap with floating seed, tufted daisies, nettles, and dead men’s fingers. I gather them up in my robe, close to my womb, and sigh for the proximity.
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‘My daughter? She is daisy fresh! My daughter? Blue blood. High rump. Lovely skin. Like porcelain! You can touch, sonny lord, but don’t you break it’ (Polonius, before he is stabbed).
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Famous deaths by drowning: Virginia Woolf, L’Inconnue de la Seine, Rasputin (NB: after being poisoned, shot repeatedly, castrated, and badly beaten, it is water that gets him in the end).
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Brown brook bubbling. Toilless. Untroubled. Clogged with thick weeds, summer green algal blooms. Here and there: grasping reeds, lily pads, nenuphars. A weak Babylonian willow, grey-leaved in its old age, overhanging.
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Nymphaea, the largest genus of water lilies, is home to the common nenuphar, or European White Water Lily, which is said to resemble a floating virgin. More exotic species include Nymphaea pubescens (Hairy water lily), named for the pubescent fuzz along its undersides and stem.
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Lizzie Siddal is nineteen when she models for Millais in that bathtub. A consumptive copperhead with widely spaced features and an antique dress. She has a penchant for poppies.
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‘Bloating and discoloration can be expected. The abdomen becomes greenish or purple, and distends as the cavity fills with gas. Features may swell to the point of obscuring the victim’s identity’ (The same forensics manual).
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Highgate cemetery. West. Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti (née Siddal). Tangled gravesite. Leprous stone angels.
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‘They call me The Wild Rose. But my name was Elisa Day’ (Kylie Minogue).
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Elsinore cannot hold me. I have a yen for the forests of my forebears, overrun with bracken, sphagnum moss, black leeches. The blue-black bodies of sacrificial victims. In my head, I hear snatches of Old Norse, Viking lullabies.
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AUTOPSY REPORT:
Age: Nineteen
Race: Nordic
Sex: Fair
Hair: Elizabethan Red
Lips: Blue as frostbite, perennials.
Possessions: various garlands, love letters, Rasputin’s penis.
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‘Say what you will, she died with a song on her lips’ (The priest).