Basin

By Scott McCulloch

A nomad swallows poison and drowns himself. Resuscitated by a paramilitary bandit named Aslan, Figure is nursed back into a world of violence, sexuality and dementia. Together, Figure and Aslan traverse a coastline erupting in conflict. When the nearest city is ethnically cleansed, Figure escapes on the last ship evacuating to the other isle of the sea. Crossing village to village largely on foot, a slew of outcasts and ghosts guide him as he navigates states of cultural and metaphysical crisis. 
Scott McCulloch’s debut novel, Basin, explores the axis of landscape and consciousness. Echoing the modernist tradition, and written in an incendiary yet elliptical prose style, Basin maps the phenomenon of a civilisation being reborn – a hallucinatory elegy to the inter-zones of self and place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781743822395

Scott McCulloch

Born in Melbourne, based between Ukraine and the Caucasus since 2014, and having recently moved to the Mediterranean, where he divides his time between Greece and Lebanon, Scott McCulloch works with prose, essay and sound. His writings have appeared in Southerly, Australian Book Review, Art & Australia Magazine, Kill Your Darlings and elsewhere. Basin is his debut novel.

Book preview

[ one ]

Figure in Terminal Landscape

0

Shadow appears above, pushes on my stomach, sucks at my mouth, slaps my cheeks, drags me across pebble beach onto patch of black sand. Eyelids droop and close, black holes holding sight behind them as gravity slips, body shutting down. Shadow returns with a bicycle pump and two long plastic hoses attached to the valve. He forces one of the tubes down my throat and I feel my oesophagus clench at the cool plastic as it pushes down to stomach. The man places the other tube over one of my shoulders and pumps the handle back and forth. Warm bile trickles out of the second tube between shoulder blades, trailing down with a faint sting through short white hairs on back. He pushes the tube deeper into my abdomen and pumps, extracting the mix of poison and pills I gulped before running out to sea and stuffing head in plastic bag as I felt last rush of water, then dove into death. Dying and over-and-done, finished, I gave over to death – great morning of monstrous light, still searching with last droop of lid – now waking to ravaged throat and wide eyes on pebble beach. He dumps me around the shore. Slaps me again. Pumps the handle. Slaps. Dung of stomach spat on bare thighs. Ribcage filling with pressurised air. I vomit as the tide rolls in, diluting the sick across wet sands.

He picks me up, sets me over his right shoulder, crosses the promenade. Through bile on chapped lips I smell the pepper of eucalypts. Buildings with missing windows have large numbers painted on their sides. Back streets, puddles, pig carcasses hung up on hooks and covered in plastic, the siphon dangling from the man’s denim back pocket, passers-by indifferent to him walking down the road carrying my half-corpse – mess of wires sheathed in crusted skin, my synapses pollute each other back into motion.

Water splashes in the open sewer. A large catfish whips its tail against the concrete side.

Another street and number: Helena blind alley, 2A. Palm trees over one hundred years old shade tall statues. The man pats me on the arse, lowers me to the curb, walks over to a small kiosk and scoops a plastic cup of shag tobacco into one of the many pockets of his fishing vest. He rolls me a cigarette, lights and passes it over. Coarse smoke curls in my throat. I cough it out. Men in the kiosk laugh, come out front, run their fingers through my hair, place a blue tarp over my bare shoulders, roll out a newspaper on the curb to my right, cut pieces of fruit with a butterfly knife and place them on the paper, then pour shots of brandy into the cap of the opened bottle and hand it to me. I swallow. My neck folds in on itself, veins pulsing through. Sharing the bottle cap, we drink in lots of three. One of the men points to a ransacked wooden house across the street, with silver guttering and floral-patterned iron fencing:

– To our brother who died in that house there. He died his dream. He filled a bath with a brandy like this and slid inside. He died drunk on life. Drowning skin in sweet alcohol. We do the same

He downs his shot. The front page of the newspaper pictures a helmeted woman kissing a deceased child beside headline: ‘Spike in Inter-Ethnic Conflict’. Lower on the page is a cartoon of worms crushed beneath hammers – white paste spilling out.

The air swelters. My shoulders wet against the tarp. My mind mincing itself on skull-bone. My throat rejects the next shot, spilling from corner of mouth onto newspaper and thigh. The men laugh and whistle as I sway sideways, my elbow squashing the cut fruit. Fat salty fingers press on my tongue and unto tonsils. More vomit purges forth, I regurgitate back into life.

The man from the beach jacks me up over his shoulder again. The others laugh and disperse into steaming streets. The humidity grimes my vision, blurring the men into shapeless forms, then their laughter dies out too, soon traceless into the open morning hours of day.

1

Naked, cold, sweating. Surrounded by patches of fever under floral blanket on top of tarp, I shudder between the different materials and listen to the sounds of dusk cicadas through keyboard notes.

I cross the hall for the toilet. I rest my head on the wall and piss. Through a hole I see the man from the beach playing an electric keyboard in his lush garden. His shoulders move about as he plays to the insects and flowers. He puffs on a thin cigarette wedged between short buckteeth, joyous as he addresses the afternoon.

Smell of fish frying in sunflower oil as I walk downstairs. The music stops. The man appears at the bottom of the stairs. He sways a touch as I take a clearer look at him: probably in his mid-fifties, salt-and-pepper hair and beard, thick-rimmed glasses, thick lips, sport sandals, unbuttoned short-sleeved shirt exposing pot belly, half-litre bottle of vodka held against groin with belt. He presses his hand on the back of my jaw, beneath ear, clasping firmly:

– Aslan

He introduces himself, moving palm down my side to hand and shakes:

– Come. See

Out on the porch, he brings a small wooden table and a newspaper. He rolls the paper over the table, goes into the next room, returns with a pan of fried bait, two forks and two shot glasses. He takes the bottle from under his belt and pours. A man strolls past with an eel on the end of a fishing rod. Aslan lifts up his glass, tries to look me in the eye, clinks our glasses. We down the fruit vodka, feeling it sting the throat, hot from the humidity and from pressing beneath his belt. He rips off a hunk of the dark loaf of bread on the table, sniffs it, dips into the sizzling oil, pinches a piece of bait, bites, breathes out. I follow and chew with my mouth open, cooling the food and trying to get the muggy air into my lungs. The oil and bread line my empty stomach. I sneeze three times in a row, spluttering pollen and getting used to the dankness again.

The day wears on. More shots of fruit vodka. Faint licks of mirage rise off the letterbox and power lines. We keep quiet, our chests open and oiled in the sun, nullified by the booze, the heat and the constant sound of cicadas.

Two donkey-pulled carts arrive with two men in each, dressed in ripped singlets, cargo and camouflage pants, sneakers, sunglasses, headbands, jewellery on necks and fingers, cigarettes in mouths. Aslan rises from his chair, embraces me, puts a set of keys in my back pocket, says to come and go as I please but I should keep here and rest and don’t trust anyone in the city, especially downtown. He takes another shot, walks to the gate, crosses himself and kisses a pendant around his neck, climbs into one of the trailers. Dust lifts up into the air as they cart off.

I flick Aslan’s keys on the tips of my fingers.

I crawl onto the grass within the lush yard and listen to my stomach – groans and spasms of black bile. I lie there and sweat. The front fence is high with broken glass bottles set in clay crowning the tops of the palings. Blooming plants line the yard: violet blankets of jacaranda in flower beneath strapping agapanthus, as well as palms, various citrus, bird of paradise.

The hum of cicadas is temporarily cut by the slice and spit of a helicopter flying somewhere in the distance.

2

Days passing. Slowly able to link one thought to the next. Caring for myself little by little, the vegetal state of my mind feels partly watered again. ‘How many people are we at once?’ I shake my head as the loathsome musing mixes with the allergens in the atmosphere. Slowly I feel the leaves in my hair and my head. I sit in my room in Aslan’s house. He’s been gone two days, maybe three, even four. I strip the sheets from the mattress and make up the bed. I fold proper corners into the sheets, lie down, roll from side to side, move my hand to my groin, pull down on the foreskin. I ejaculate quickly, watching as my body spills the white onto my stomach. I scrub it off with an old newspaper from the bedside drawer, mixing beads of sweat with dust and the black ink running in different directions through the hair on my stomach. The humidity hanging in the air drives me into an odd and false fever.

The washroom is a bare block with a concrete floor, blue and white tiles on the walls, and two taps less than a metre off the ground with a long trough underneath. I take two buckets from the corner and fill them with cold water. A polystyrene cup floats in the trough. I strip off the singlet and shorts Aslan has lent me, scoop the cup into the buckets, splash myself with the cold water. I shiver as the water hits my skin and feel my heart rate jolt, toes curl, nipples harden. I keep splashing myself. Washing between my toes, the nape of my neck, through my hair, scrubbing my lower belly and the head of my cock, my arse, armpits, the sleep from my eyes. The sting from the salt on my skin washes away.

I turn to find Aslan in the doorway. He nods my way, as if to say, you’re mending up good, then walks back down the corridor. He staggers as he goes, seemingly drunk again. He returns a moment later with a towel and a set of clothes and throws them at me. I unfurl the towel and see that it’s a flag of some description; primary colours, stripes, two hands praying. I dry my face, move it down to my chest and see that Aslan has left the washroom.

I dress and walk towards the sound of the radio playing in the alcove.

Aslan places a loaf of bread on the table, steps into the kitchen, returns with a plate of hotdogs split at the sides from over-boiling, hot mustard, two plates and two shot glasses. He takes a new half-litre bottle of fruit vodka from behind his belt and fills our cups to the brim. I watch a snail slide across the plastic tablecloth. It stops between the glasses, curls into its shell. Aslan looks to me and raises his glass:

– To the slug!

He looks at our cups with the waxen glaze that captures the moment a drunk has opened their hangover with more alcohol. He sips the shot but barely gets it down from giggling to himself. I drink mine to the bottom and push the glass towards the bottle for more.

Aslan walks to the window and pulls the curtain off the rails above, then wraps his shoulders in it and dumps himself back in the chair. The lights switch off in the neighbour’s two-storey house, then the next series of lights from the houses behind turn off in quick succession, into the distance. Farther out in the long horizon, shadows of factory chimneys billow smoke into the night sky. Cicadas, termites, mantis and beetles shimmer and ring out in slow tremolo. Aslan has craned his neck back, staring at the ceiling:

– Listen!

– Hey?

– Shh … just listen, listen to them

– The bugs?

– To them murmurs, to them shrieks, like, like radar, like waltzing mice

– You mean the bugs, right?

– O them frogs! What timpani of heart … just delicious … jazz all the way … such little minstrels, whores for the ears. Answer me, but first fill the cups, then answer …

I top up our glasses.

– What do you say?

He giggles between mumbles:

– How many words do we speak a day?

– Very few. We only met on the beach a few days ago

– I mean, the total amount of words, a day. How many words would I speak a day? Hundreds? Thousands?

– What does it matter?

– Nothing, nothing. Crack, rattle. One bug sheds its skin for the next, so the music never stops, on and on and on. Kaputt, kaploosh. That’s masterpiece, that’s … that’s