Nulla Osta

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Nulla Osta (born 15 March 1971–disappeared 14 March 2011) was a British avant- garde writer noted for her changing and challenging style.[1] Only four novels by Osta were published, but it is believed that she wrote at least one more–the rare, privately circulated Ø–along with several short fictions. The four published novels are Rivets(1999), The Giantess(2001), Virtute in Chains(2007) and The Sea at Night(2008). Osta was last seen the day before her fortieth birthday and there has been much speculation as to what happened to her. The most likely theory is that she took her own life by jumping into the sea, with some commentators noting that ‘seacide’ is the leading cause of death of an Osta character.[2]

That doesn’t do much for me, mind, the idea that an artist’s life is represented in their work. I know autofiction is a thing now–nothing can be done about it–and that certain authors from the vanguard of the avant garde couldn’t write a dot if they’re not at the centre of their own creations, but I don’t find it hard to separate one from the other, or to perceive coincidence where others see prophecy. ‘What do you care?’ Noone says to me, as I’m decrying the banality of the critics, one of my favourite things to do on a Saturday afternoon when we’ve nothing to do, which is always.

Osta remains an obscure figure (the experimental documentarist Lee Stirling has described her as ‘the cult author’s cult author’)[3] despite attempts to have her work reappraised. Her second novel, The Giantess, was rumoured to have been optioned by a French film studio, but no record of any such agreement has been found.

It was Noone turned me onto Osta. They pulled out a crumpled notebook and said, ‘I think you’ll like this.’ It was a passage from one of her novels–Rivets, I later learned–that Noone had found somewhere, and copied out, and which

was reminiscent of one I’d read to them from Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners; something about changing seasons and falling leaves. Piccadilly Circus being a playground and London peculiar. That sort of stuff.

I’d said how every place should have a series of sentences that summed it up solely for one person. I once told Noone I missed having a place to belong to and I guess the two things clicked. They said something like, ‘You’re from that way aren’t you?’ They didn’t know much about the extract. It was just something they’d come across a while ago.

Life

Osta was born in Amble, Northumberland, in 1971, to Britt Osta, a single mother in a small fishing community. Her father’s identity remains unknown. Osta left home at the age of sixteen and over the following two years hitchhiked her way across the country, taking on temporary work where she could, eventually arriving in London, an event that was reflected in the opening chapter of her final novel The Sea at Night.

Osta’s mother emigrated from Denmark to England sometime in the 1950s. Britt Osta’s reasons for leaving one cold land for another are lost to time, but she’s still remembered by some of the older residents of Alnmouth and Amble, the two villages where she lived the longest. The Northumbrian coast is spectacular in summer, wild in winter, and perhaps best suited to those who can withstand extremes. I remember summers there with fondness, unlike any other seasons in my childhood. I go back as an adult to find out more about Osta. Her mother is still remembered as a quiet, hard-working woman. She mostly laundered, but sometimes fixed the trawls and was a good seamstress. One old man shows me a blazer he still wears, whose patches, administered by Britt, are only just beginning to wear away. Of Osta’s father, no one will speak.

A woman I meet who remembered Nulla said she’d been a quiet child whose presence was negligible. There was nothing that marked her out as creative or remarkable. Most young people with artistic yearnings move to Newcastle or Sunderland, she says, or further afield, although those of a creative bent who stay often turn their hand to watercolours or landscape poetry. The woman encourages me to visit her friend’s gallery further up the coast in Seahouses and I lie that I will. She can’t shed any light on Nulla’s reasons for leaving, nor can she say anything about the putative father, save for that they were ‘wild times for wild men’. She does tell me that Osta once pulled pints in a local pub. Apparently there was a running joke that the girls who worked there

always ended up pregnant by the landlord. But the woman can’t recall any such landlord, just the ‘seedy bastard’ who inherited it from his father, and who’s long since gone the journey.

The pub in question is the Three Tups. It may well have been the inspiration for The Tup pub in Rivets, in which Osta describes the regulars as, ‘…dirty and feculent. Good for nothing and no good at even that.’ Ecks, the antagonist of that novel, takes a job there after getting kicked out of school. He spends his days drawing sketches of the punters, who slump over tables and dream out of windows, and lusting after the young girl who collects the pots and wears a symbolically white blouse that somehow never gets stained.

The Three Tups is the sort of place where no one who’s not local has any business being there, but where business barely exists, so no one complains. I drink a pint of cider, unbothered by the bored bartender, or the dusty patrons that occupy their own solitary tables. No one is interested in my obscure questions about obscurer writers. My looming presence sometimes attracts attention in enclosed spaces, but here I’m no one to anyone. I imagine the teenaged Osta, pulling pints, picking them up, dunking the dead glasses in dishwater and drying them with a dishcloth. Maybe she scrawls notes to herself in between rounds, or perhaps the physical act of creation comes later, at home, or over a table she has to herself in the pub, where the landlord allows her a lager shandy in the hope of a hand.

Nothing in the Three Tups suggests acknowledgement of the millennium. It barely recognises the twentieth century. There are no quiz machines or bandits. The register is analogue and looks pleasingly dangerous. The peg- letter tariff is in old money. Everything is a world away. Behind the bar are spirits in bottles older than me, trophies coated in ancient dust, pinned photos of barmaids and barflies long gone. One of these photos looks like how I imagine Osta to have been. I take it while the barman’s back is turned. It’s the work of moments and all of a sudden I’m in possession of what I’m certain is the only known photo of Nulla Osta in existence. I clip it into my journal and cover it with crepe.

Once in London, Osta found work at Billingsgate Fish Market. The early starts allowed her to write in the late mornings, through to early afternoons, which sessions allegedly culminated in her unpublished novel, Ø. After making inroads with the literary demimonde of the day, she found work with John Calder, typing up minutes and working through the slush pile, through which she met the poet Jan Allan, who offered her accommodation and with whom she remained friends throughout her life. Allan was reportedly the last person to see Osta alive.

The subject of _Ø_is one of the more contentious areas of Osta’s life, although it’s only seriously debated within small circles, of whose existence I learned about when I accidentally stumbled into their orbit. Broadly speaking, there are two main camps: those who say _Ø_is a full-length novel that Osta published herself, thus making it her real debut, and those who claim it was talked about by Osta during her early, gregarious years, but never written. The Next Tuesday Society–a curious group who seek to control awareness of Osta’s work–take the latter position. But Oscar Leconte, a retired bookseller and old acquaintance of Osta’s, claims to have owned a copy that was given to him by her as a gift. This copy was allegedly stolen in a burglary many years ago. Leconte, a pleasant, quiet man, believes the theft was organised by The Next Tuesday Society as a means of removing the book from circulation. Of the handful of people I spoke to who made similar claims of ownership–best estimates suggest only ten copies were made–all had similar stories of theft or loss. Given the length of time that would have elapsed since anyone might have read it, the contents are hard to assemble, but my research suggests the following:

_Ø_is a _bildungsroman_of sorts, a fond depiction of the wild nature of the kind of coastal villages Osta grew up in, juxtaposed with the mostly male violence found within them. Storms are synonyms for angry fathers; scrublands are allegories of the supressed potential of the women and children subject to such anger. As plots go, it doesn’t seep with originality–the novel culminates in the antagonist being thrown into the sea–but the readers I spoke to recalled Osta’s particular way with words. Leconte in particular described her ability to ‘make foreign the familiar and unknown the known,’ and admittedly even this description causes me to nostalj in a queasy, irresistible way. A retired teacher in Morpeth who thought she ‘might have instructed someone called Nulla, maybe Nuala,’ remembers a ‘quiet, daydreamish child, who could be no more taught to follow the dictates of standard English than a wild boar.’

Little is known about Osta’s life beyond her official works, which include several stories that appeared in ephemeral magazines published in Paris. These publications have not survived, but the Osta archive claims to hold copies and drafts. The archive is run by the Next Tuesday Society, a small, intensely private group which claims moral ownership of Osta’s work and does not permit dissemination[4]. It is possible to view the archive, but appointments are supervised closely and few requests are even responded to, with one journalist describing the process–from contacting the society to viewing the archive–as ‘traumatically cabbalistic’.[5]

I first heard of The Next Tuesday Society from Leconte. What little he could tell me sounded implausible on grounds of banality: a small–he guessed at fewer than five members–group of people who admire Osta’s work and seek to protect it to the point of obscurism. His suspicions regarding the burglary stem from a calling card–he was kind enough to let me keep it–that was left at the scene of the crime, with the group’s name on it in black Garamond type. The reference is to the title of a story Osta had published in Ci Tron, a short-lived absurdist French-English pamphlet. Both Allan and Leconte were incredibly helpful in engaging with my research on Osta, whereas that other key player in her life–the writer and director Bree Hawthorne–proved to be unreachable, despite my repeated letters and emails to her office. I once observed her dawdling over a Waldorf salad in the restaurant of the Soho Hotel, until I was asked to leave, so I know she’s around, and she didn’t even finish it. Meanwhile I’m starving and broke.

Osta is known to have suffered from bouts of mental illness from an early age. One episode resulted in her leaving London for several months, during which period she worked at a hotel in the Lake District, returning only when Allan tracked her down, following receipt of a postcard, to advise that her novel had been accepted for publication and the publishers had sent an advance. Allan’s concern, she acknowledged, was also motivated by the fact that Osta owed her a substantial amount of back-rent.[6]

It was Jan Allan who told me about Osta’s states of mind. She was considerate in her account, but cautious; it had been hard for her too. I sympathised, having experiences in that area: my foster parents had needs of their own, which meant that they were unable–in the end–to accommodate mine. Plus there was the matter of my size, which proved unmanageable (they used to call me ‘the Great Dane’) although they’d been advised in advance. Allan was good enough to give me the postcard. Osta’s handwriting was crazed chaos, much like mine.

I set off for the Lakes for a few days and stayed in the same hotel Osta had worked at, walking around, taking in the atmosphere, asking nudging questions of the staff. But none of them had been there long enough to know her. In The Sea at Night, an item of great value is discovered stashed in the pigeonholes of a hotel’s reception. I wanted to know if this place existed in the real world, despite my thoughts on the line between an artist and their work. In the end, tired of my questions and my strange attempts to get behind the

counter, the manager suggested the name of a regular in the hotel bar who ‘might have known your friend’.

This pickle of a woman remembered Osta, if only vaguely. I found that was often how she was recalled by others–apart from Jan Allan and Oscar Leconte–shorn of details, as though her character wasn’t sharp enough to permeate consciousness. She worked at the hotel over the summer but boarded with a teacher nearby. The teacher had long departed, but the woman pointed out which house it was as I escorted her home. There was a storm that night and it lasted hours. Several homes lost power and the hotel accommodated those in need. I took a walk in the wild; returned to London the next day.

The day before her fortieth birthday, Osta called on Allan, who still lived in the Soho flat they’d shared years before. According to a statement to the police made by Allan they ‘…drank coffee and made tentative plans for dinner the following week’. Osta said that she wished to spend her birthday alone, in her own home, a small terraced house in Osterley, west London. Over two weeks later, having been unable to reach her via telephone, letter and then in person, Allan reported Osta missing. The Metropolitan Police closed their enquiry three months later, having determined there was no evidence of harm or foul play; that Osta appeared to have ‘left her life of her own volition’. There being no next of kin to follow the matter up (Britt Osta died the year after Osta left home; Allan claims to have been stonewalled by the police), the report remains dormant.[7]

Apparently the question of why Osta came to Osterley is an obsession of The Next Tuesday Society. (It occurs, too much to my delight, that the adjective ‘Osterley’ might easily apply to her work.) I get this titbit from a member of the small online forum I’ve joined–seven people, plus me–devoted to Osta. It’s a niche interest, but everyone has one. My source lives in Uist, so an excursion of their own is out of the question. I told them I’d make the pilgrimage on their behalf, but if anything of interest comes up I’ll be keeping it to myself. Nothing does though. ‘Never heard of her,’ says the woman who lives at Osta’s old address in the London district that almost bears her name. She’s suspicious of me, and fair enough, but still curious enough to ask: ‘What was she then–a writer?’ A long time ago, I say. Mind if I come in? ‘I have a husband you know,’ the woman says, but I manage to squeeze a brew out of her. The husband turns out to be a ruse.

The house is small and furnished in a late twentieth-century style: brown and orange wallpaper; ashtray-stand; an illegal-looking gas fire. I look at

the woman carefully, mentally age-progress the photo of Osta in my journal and map it to her face. It’s not a match and a stupid game anyway. She’s about the same age as Osta would be, but the accent is southern, faux-refined. Supposedly Osta spoke a hybrid of Baltic-Pitmatic, which–Allan told me– prevented her from surmounting the class barriers that encircle the world of publishing. Also, it’d be too easy to find her here. There’s the matter of ownership–Osta’s name would have been on the title deed when she was last seen–but Land Registry proves incompetent in the face of basic enquiries. The woman owns the property but clams up when I ask who she bought it off. It’s clear I’ve outstayed my welcome. I admire the small bronze on the windowsill: two horned animals intertwined. She says they were there when she moved in, and then I’m outside and cold.

The woman who runs the nearby Osterley Bookshop is more helpful. ‘I know of her. We’ve had people ask before. This was years ago. I was supposed to email them if I ever came across anything. By the time I did I’d lost their business card.’ Have you still got this anything? ‘Somewhere… Hold on… Here we are. How would you say that? Zero? Nought?’ It’s pronouncedØ. ‘Well, it’s yours if you want it.’

Career

Osta is associated with a loose collective of authors and artists in the late eighties and early nineties, whose influence is so negligible they are almost forgotten. Their most prominent member was Bree Hawthorne, best known for her 1992 novel _Adélie, Adélie!_which was translated into a number of languages. It was by her association with Hawthorne that Osta travelled throughout Europe during the 1990s and early 2000s, spending long stretches of time in Copenhagen, Berlin and Bergen, periods which are allegedly fictionalised in Hawthorne’s 2015 novel, Big Queen, with some critics suggesting that the titular character is a palimpsest of Osta, something that Hawthorne has not explicitly denied.

I’ve read _Big Queen_and, frankly, it stinks. If I were Osta then I’d stay missing, presumed dead, in order to exact a consequence-free revenge. Hawthorne depicts her as a substance-obsessed amateur intent on following her much more successful writer friend around Europe on some meaningless escapade. The whole thing is poor, even for autofiction, a genre derided and dismissed by Osta in The Giantess, where the eponymous character says the only reasonable excuse for self-expression can be when a person’s self is worth the

bother of being expressed. (‘Which–generally–they aren’t.’) There’s barely a suggestion of plot and the characters are thin. It’s embarrassing. And shit.

Osta’s first novel, Rivets, was published by Lynch & Sons in 1999. It was influenced, she claimed, in an early conversation with Allan, by ‘David Copperfield and James Joyce,'[8] although she later disavowed the latter’s influence, claiming to find Ulysses‘more useful as a doorstop’. The novel’s central theme, a discourse on small communities obliterated by wider economic processes, can be read as a tribute to the fishing village in which she was brought up, with the central character–a young man or woman referred to only as ‘Ecks’–‘buffeted by forces beyond their control, the violent whims of workers and weathers, themselves subject to serfdom and solar variations.’

It was of particular interest to the editor of Lynch & Sons, Con Alder, who’d also grown up on the Northumbrian coast. Osta benefited from Alder’s favour, and it was he who commissioned her to write a second novel. But following a heart attack he retired and was succeeded in the post by Virgil Evers, who saw no merit in Osta’s work, and so she fell from grace. However, _Rivets_was well-received in the minor circles that Osta cared to socialise in and a number of positive reviews boosted her profile. Middle-class critics descended on her experimental approach to the kitchen-sink novel and she was briefly fêted. The poet Jan Allan commented that ‘Nulla’s head was turned for a short time– which young author wouldn’t be dazzled by even a small amount of attention?–but she soon saw through it and shunned it shortly after.'[9]

Virgil Evers is still around. He was happy to speak to me, although was of little help in shining a light on the enigma that is Osta. Mostly he was apologetic for having let her go, claiming to be ‘green and egotistic’ at the time. However, he was able to dig out a typewritten MS of _The Giantess_and gave it to me as a gift. I’m not quite ready to go into that book in detail, but Osta’s original version is so much rawer and affecting than the one published. What The Next Tuesday Society would give to have it… I half-consider taking a photo and sending it to their PO Box, then think it might be advisable to avoid their attentions. My Uist friend–who I suspect capable of conspiracy–can have it in the event of my untimely death. I’ve no one else to bequeath it to.

_Rivets_was followed by The Giantess(2001), Virtute in Chains(2007) and The Sea at Night(2008), in all of which Osta continued her stylistic evolution, albeit without the attention afforded her debut.

_The Giantess_is seen as a partial continuation of some of the themes explored in

Rivets, with the titular character being the abandoned product of an illicit liaison between

two futureless villagers. The Giantess is left on the steps of the lighthouse and placed into the care of the Authority, an unsubtle allegory for social services. Her physical growth is unprecedented–there is some suggestion that she is encephalitic; from the title of the novel she clearly has gigantism–and her early years are marked by bullying and abuse, until she is too old to be the Authority’s responsibility. The Giantess perceives everything on distorted scales (Osta herself is believed to have suffered from dysmetropsia). She ‘stumblestrides’ across the unnamed land–_The Giantess_is notable for its compound phrases and neologisms–looking for work, but finding mostly hostility.

Parts of the novel have been described as pornographic, although more tempered reviews have reflected that it merely depicts ‘consensual relations between parties not normally spotlit.’ Parallels have been drawn between the Giantess’s flight from her small village and Osta’s own path, although this interpretation was roundly derided by her as being ‘facile and pithy.’ However, such interpretations persist, particularly given the affecting death of the Giantess partway through the novel (the second half is an imagining of how her life might have been) when she throws herself into the sea from the lighthouse by which she was abandoned, and of which she becomes the sole custodian.

I cannot talk of this. It is too much.

Six years elapsed between the publication of Osta’s second and third novels, much of which period is shrouded in mystery. The most notable appearances of her work during this time were short stories or fragments, which were published sporadically and without notice in English and French periodicals. These were also the years during which she travelled with Bree Hawthorne. The Next Tuesday Society has alleged Hawthorne stole papers from Osta that rightfully belong in its archive, but as the legal ownership of any of Osta’s work is debatable at best, little–if anything–has come from this. The Next Tuesday Society’s claim over the Osta archive persists mostly because there are no known living relatives or representatives of the author around to dispute it.

The more I hear about them, the more I loathe The Next Tuesday Society. Like, where do they get off appropriating Osta’s works? Part of the problem, Jan Allan tells me, is to do with the question of whether Osta is dead or not. Officially, she’s alive but unaccounted for (Allan refers to her as ‘Schrödinger’s Author’) and this ambiguity goes to the heart of the problem. Presuming Osta is alive, only she can reasonably object to the actions of The Next Tuesday Society; ergo, if she is alive, then she’s either unaware of said actions or simply doesn’t care. (Another take–this, from my friend in Uist–is that Osta _is_The

Next Tuesday Society. That’s a stretch too far for me, Allan too, although she imagines it being the sort of stunt Osta would find amusing.)

Presuming Osta is dead, only her next-of-kin can reasonably object… et cetera. With Britt deceased and her family unknown–ditto Osta’s father– there is no one to do so. (Another wild take from Uist goes that Osta became pregnant at sixteen–that being the reason she left home. My friend traces a flexible history whereby Osta becomes pregnant by either the lothario landlord or some other–forever lost–feckless fucker [in a wilder version of events it’s her own father] and flees, giving birth before getting to London, and abandoning the child on the steps of some civic centre somewhere, semi- per the plot of The Giantess. Again, amusing, but unlikely, or at least too reliant on unknowns to become known.) My take is that The Next Tuesday Society are art-wank vultures looking to sanctify Osta in her absence, using her name as a publishing philosopher’s stone, a literary grail. Yes, I loathe them.

Osta’s third novel, Virtute in Chains, was declined by most publishers, including Lynch & Sons, on the grounds that while her work ‘possessed strong artistic merit, [they] could find no commercial potential for it in the current market.’ The book departs from the working- class settings of her previous novels. It takes place in several locations, none of which are named, but appear to be European cities, to which the two main protagonists appear to travel to instantly and at will. The critic Nils Frame suggested that Julio Cortázar’s _62/ Modelo para armar_might have been an influence[10], although contemporary reviews found it ‘even more confusing and missteppish than that novel’.

_Virtute in Chains_is my favourite of all Osta’s novels because it remains true to her experimental tendencies while reaching for a wider audience. But for the dreamish and labyrinthine qualities of the narrative, it could have been a successful film. I’ve heard it said that Osta had more in common with avant- garde cinematographers than writers, and I agree. Leconte told me about the time he took her to a viewing of _Goodbye to Marienbad_at the Curzon Mayfair and she returned for every subsequent viewing until they changed features. Once you know that factlet the novel makes a lot more sense. Anyway, Allan puts me in touch with the gonzo journalist, Amber Gris, the one person she knows to have viewed the Osta archive.

Gris is a divorced fifty-two-year-old man with a drinking problem, which means he’s only too happy to meet me at The Groucho Club for a liquid lunch. After exhausting what I can only assume is a Pavlovian attempt at flirting–a

life spent schmoozing and boozing will do that to certain persons–we get down to the serious business of the archive. ‘To start with,’ Gris tells me, ‘it doesn’t exist in any one place. The jumps and hoops I had to run through [sic] in order to see the fucking thing. Meet us here, meet us there… The number of abandoned appointments… I would have given up but that I knew it was all part of the game, that eventually–I hoped–they’d come good. Which, eventually, they did. I’m saying us, them, they, but I reckon it’s one person pulling a fuckaround.’ I mention Leconte’s estimate. ‘Nah, he’s got it wrong. I mean, there are obscure authors and then there’s Nulla. There must be some kind of inverse law to be formulated. The less-known an artist is, the fewer admirers they’ll have, but the more touched those admirers will be. No offense.’ There’s none taken because, actually, I agree. ‘What’s your interest in her anyway? Is it the…?’ He means my size, of course. I remain unoffended– I’m used to it–but it’s not the reason. I ask Gris if he can help me get access to the archive, but he says once a person has viewed it they’re banned from contacting The Next Tuesday Society for life. The only thing I can do is to apply myself. I’ve done this, obviously, but without give. ‘Try again,’ Gris says. ‘And keep trying. That’s what I did.’

I ask about his own interest, what it was like accessing the archive and what he saw. ‘Just an article,’ he says. ‘On the great forgotten writers. People like Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, they’re too well-known now. I got the brief to _really_dig up some corpuses. Nulla was as good as it got. I spent months, almost a year, on the backs of the NTS. By the time they’d agreed to _think_about meeting with me, the article had been pulled. I thought, I might as still well… I met this woman–younger than me, a little older than you–at a pub in Leyton. It was Sunday afternoon and dead. She bought me a few drinks and asked why I wanted to see the archive. I told her about the article, at which point she said that the society didn’t exist to promote Nulla’s work, but to preserve it. I said the article was dead anyway and I just wanted to know more. That softened her up a little, or at least that was the impression she gave. We met up two more times, cancellations notwithstanding, after which she told me–I never knew her name, that’s another thing–but after which she told me to come to The Ivy one evening and ask for “the Tuesday Reservation”. I did and I was shown into a private room where the society rep was waiting.

‘Instead of a cloth, plates and the like, there were, set out on the table, seven archive boxes. They were battered and dusty as hell. I was expecting something sleeker. I went to open them–greedily, I thought later–but

the woman stopped me and said I had to choose just one. I thought, you fuckers… But if that’s how it was to be… So I went for the one I was going to open anyway. there was a diary from 1987. A postcard from Llandudno. A sort of military cross, but not English. And loads–and I mean loads–of exercise books. The kind you got back then. Hard back, soft cover, you know? Absolutely filled with notes. Don’t ask me what about. Nulla’s handwriting was impenetrable. The only things I remember being able to interpret were what looked to be something about a dog and a diary entry marking the death, or the anniversary of the death, of her mother.

‘And the postcard, of course, which was addressed to her mate in Soho. It wasn’t signed, just said something like, To the evil memory. It wasn’t postmarked Wales either, but London. I must have spent an hour exactly, going through it all, when the rep told me time was up. She bustled me out and that was the last time I heard from the society. Although, I swear she was on TV a few years ago, promoting face cream. Which makes me think she wasn’t anything more than an actor hired by the society. It’s the sort of batshit thing they’d do. Anyway, that’s it. What do you think then, eh?’ I said I thought it was interesting how he referred to her as Nulla, as though they’d been friends, or something more. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Wrong tree. You want to speak to Haz.’ He got up then, I presumed to urinate, but after ten minutes–and a request to the staff to check the toilets–I was told that Gris had been seen leaving via another door. I text Jan Allan–_Who Haz?_She tells me to come over.

Hawthorne, who claims to have been present for the genesis of Virtute in Chains, has said the novel’s rejection had a profound effect on Osta, who went into a deep depression and did not speak for several months. Friends attempted psychiatric intervention, but Allan blocked any attempts to detain Osta in hospital, instead choosing to support her alone. During this period Allan catered for Osta, who would only eat small amounts, and bathed her, until one day–without statement or warning–she abandoned her mutism and announced her decision to go out and look for a ‘proper job’.[11]

Honestly, I couldn’t care less about what Bree Hawthorne’s thoughts are on anything. ‘Haz’ turns out to be Nicholas Hasmere, a one-time art dealer who stayed in the business long enough to make a killing, but got out before the city’s coke supply turned sub-par. Also, Osta had an on-off affair with him while she lived with Allan; often, Allan would come home to hear them making love in Osta’s bedroom and one time in the kitchen. Hasmere,

according to Allan, was obsessed with Osta. His business schtick at that time consisted of an incessant hyping of emerging artists until one of them broke out, an approach comparable to ‘throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks’. He then minimised the sticking artists’ output in order to produce demand through scarcity.

This approach had a limited life span and Hasmere gave it up in good time. But Allan suspected him of playing a similar game with Osta. Their relationship came to an end after his attempt to break into the Soho apartment, accusing Osta of stealing a valuable sculpture, although the truth was she was ready to confront his wife with their affair.

On not seeing or hearing from Osta for three days, Allan contacted the police with her concerns. However, after making several enquiries, she was told that the disappearance was not a police matter. It is unclear as to whether or not the police had already established Osta’s whereabouts, but several months passed before Allan received a postcard from Osta postmarked from the Lake District, saying that all was well and that she was working as a concierge in a hotel, was happy with her new life and never wanted to write another book. Allan called to say that Marion Boyars had accepted _Virtute in Chains_and sent an advance for a follow-up. Osta returned to London the same day.[12]

_Virtute in Chains_takes a freewheeling approach to narrative, which Osta defended repeatedly in interviews, disavowing the suggestion–later validated in Hawthorne’s diaries–that she was under the influence of LSD for much of its composition. In it, two young women–unnamed, as most Osta ant/protagonists are–travel across an unnamed continent, indulging in alcohol and narcotics, on the run from one of the pair’s violent ex-boyfriend, an art-dealer from whom they have hidden a valuable painting. As a result of their prodigious drug intake, neither can remember where the painting is, so they spend much of the novel retracing their steps, revisiting the same cities again and again, resulting in a hypnotic, almost-hallucinatory experience for the reader, as scenes are repeated with minor variations and conversations revisited and edited. As one of the protagonists inevitably throws themselves from a ferry, the other–in the throes of a violent comedown–has an epiphanic memory of where the painting is. The novel ends on a cliffhanger, with the suggestion that a sequel is in the offing (hence Boyars’ surprising advance) although such a follow-up never came and it is doubtful that Osta ever intended for there to be one.

I must confess, having heard Allan’s account of Osta’s relationship with Hasmere, I gave some credence to the alleged theft of the sculpture as a palimpsest of the McGuffin-painting in Virtute in Chains. But again, too easy; too ‘facile and pithy’, as Osta herself might say. No one knows where Hasmere is these days anyway, although Monaco was floated as one location.

Once it became clear that Osta was not going to produce a sequel to Virtute in Chains, Marion Boyars dropped her from their list of authors and attempted to have their advance returned. However, Osta had already used it to buy a small house in Osterley, west London, along with funds of unknown provenance. (Osta often described herself as being ‘pornographically poor’.) Jan Allan has said that Osta occasionally referred to her ‘nest egg, back-up plan and Nazi gold'[13] but it was never clear what this might be. Letters to the address went unanswered and visitors were rarely seen. Nevertheless, both Allan and Hawthorne claim to have been in regular telephone correspondence with her most weeks, and her former editor at Marion Boyars spotted her dining with an unidentified woman in a Soho restaurant and chased her all the way down Charing Cross Road for the debt, an incident which made the papers of the TLS.[14] This was her last ‘public’ appearance.

I have a copy of that edition of the _TLS_and the account is specious at best. Osta wasn’t chased, Leconte told me. She was merely late for a dental appointment which she’d postponed too many times and enough, quite frankly, was enough.

The minor publicity led to a conversation, brokered by Allan, between Osta and Anaetal Press. Within a matter of months _The Sea at Night_was on the shelves. Hawthorne professes to have seen an early draft of the novel in 2002, leading to the theory that Osta had been hoarding works, but The Next Tuesday Society has declined to account for its holdings.

I did as Gris advised, kept up the pressure on the society, sent them messages through their website regularly, emphasising my personal curiosity in Osta and that in no way was I seeking to exploit her work. Eventually, the website went down. Gris told me that this wasn’t unusual, but in this case it never went up again. I tried tracing the name registered to the PO Box, but the address appeared to have been cancelled. My last attempt was a series of tweets through a shadow profile trying to get #thenexttuesdaysociety trending, but my account was suspended for displaying bot-like activity. In the end I gave up.

_The Sea at Night_is the shortest of all Osta’s published novels–less than one hundred pages–but it still manages to cover large swathes of ground. It is seen by some as a return to a theme recurrent in Osta’s fragments, that of childhood abandonment and the search by one mother for the child that was taken from them when they were very young.

Unusually, for an Osta novel, the ending is mostly unambiguous and positive: mother and child are reunited. For some critics this was seen as a maturation of the author; for others, an abandonment of her earlier experimental and avant-garde tendencies. However, the novel was broadly well-received,[15] although Anaetal Press closed within its first year of operation and the novel quickly fell out of circulation.

My least favourite of her books, I bought a copy from a flea-market in Tynemouth. It has its merits, but I’m with the critics who saw it as an abandonment of all the things that made her a good writer. I’m no author myself though, and three out of four (wait. Scratch that: four out of five) ain’t bad.

Osta mostly stayed at home in the aftermath of The Sea at Night‘s release, insisting on bookshop appearance via videotelephony rather than in-person. It has been speculated that she was suffering another mental-collapse, and from agoraphobia, but a letter from Osta to Allan from the time reads that she was merely ‘tired, bored of travelling from place to place…’ and that she just wanted to ‘stay at home and watch the news.'[16]

Disappearance

In the latter half of 2010 and the early months of 2011, Jan Allan was the only person with whom Osta was in contact. Osta paid Allan a rare visit on 14 March, the day before her fortieth birthday, and they made plans to have dinner the following week. When Allan didn’t hear from her, she went to Osta’s house, but got no answer. She was reported missing, but after a few weeks the police closed the investigation.

Allan describes following a trail up to the Northumberland coast, where residents of Amble reported unconfirmed sightings of Osta in the vicinity on 15 March. Later, a beaded purse resembling one that Osta owned was found on Coquet Island, a lighthouse station not open to the public. However, it had been subject to heavy rain and no traces of DNA were recoverable. Although Allan believes–as others do–Osta took her life by walking into the North Sea, her official whereabouts remain unknown, and she is considered to be neither missing nor deceased.

It should not, in this day and age, be so difficult to get hold of even the most obscure author’s oeuvre, but Osta proves a challenge. No publisher retains her rights and any online listings are outdated. My guess is that The Next Tuesday Society has removed everything it can from circulation and it takes almost two years from Noone showing me the passage they’d copied out to my obtaining a copy of _Rivets_for next to nothing. One theory is that anyone who

appreciates the value of an Osta is immediately on the radar of the Society, whereas those who don’t know what they’ve got on their hands fly below it.

To begin with, I receive an email. That’s hardly surprising, because I provided them with one when I requested access to the archive. The subject of the email reads Send Ø. The originating address begins noreply@. After that I get a text with the same message, which is disconcerting, although it’s not impossible that someone I’ve been in touch with–the undoubtedly untrustworthy Amber Gris, say–has given up my number. What really puts the shits up me is the calling card that comes to the place I’ve been renting all this time, unknown to anyone but the owner. That’s when I know I have to make a move. But before that happens, in order to arrive at some kind of end, I need to go back to the beginning.

I ask Noone about the fragment. It’s a phone call but I can practically hear them shrug. ‘I don’t know,’ they say. ‘Someone paid me to put you onto it. Truth is I’d never heard of Osta Nulla. I needed the money, do you remember?’ I did. Me and Noone lived in a squat and things used to be pretty boho with us, but tight. _Who put you up to it?_I ask. ‘Some bloke,’ they say. ‘I assumed it was a joke. Someone you knew. Although I think I saw him later in that advert for car insurance…’

I decide to move on. Tell no one. Where to go, though, because nowhere now is home. I think of the poor Giantess, how things played out and how they should have. Her leap from the lighthouse and the future Osta imagined for her. I have always wanted to live in a lighthouse. The responsibility. The solitude. I wouldn’t mind that at all. There’s the lighthouse at Coquet, of course. I wonder how easy it would be to live there undetected. Perversely, my size often means I can go about ignored. When people don’t like what’s in front of them, they often choose not to see it.

The morning of my departure, I find a black envelope wedged under the door. There’s no stamp, no address, but it’s stuck with a wax seal of The Next Tuesday Society. I don’t bother going into the hall or looking out the window. Inside is my birth certificate. Not the one that was given to me by my foster parents, but the first –the original–that no one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever seen, although clearly… My father’s name is on it–along with his occupation–my mother’s too, and then there’s mine. It’s nice to finally know kin.

I go to see Jan Allan in her Soho flat for the last time and bring her flowers for her kindness. While she’s making tea I slip my copy of _Ø_onto one of

several cramped bookcases. (My journal with the Nulla photo too–Jan said she never did have one.) We talk about small things and part warmly. I lie that I’ll keep in touch.

Next, I take a series of buses up, across and around London. It’s called confusing the trail. After seven hours and eleven transfers, I arrive at Osterley. It’s dark and there’s one light on in Osta’s former house, an upstairs room. I know it won’t be long. If anyone sees me they’ll remember someone waiting for a bus that never came. After half an hour I force the door–it’s an old lock and easy. My body belies my stealth; I’ve had a lifetime of creeping around others. I take the sculpture on the windowsill and replace it with the calling card of The Next Tuesday Society that Oscar Leconte was kind enough to give me. After that it’s only a few buses to Heathrow. I spend the night in the public lounge and take a morning flight to Newcastle. I’m in Northumberland by noon and on the Amble coast soon after. The sea’s choppy though. I don’t know that anyone could have made it alone. My plans, my resolve, fail me and I’m left standing on the beach, helpless. It’s then that I see a rowboat tied to the jetty. Was this how it was for Osta? Is this how it’ll be for me? I’ve been following in my mother’s footsteps so long. What’s one more?

Legacy

Osta’s work remains obscure, with no critical or commercial hunger for reassessment or republication. However, she remains of interest to small groups, including The Next Tuesday Society, whose make-up and identity is unknown, but which claims to be in possession of all extant works authored by Osta. Its sole presence is a sporadically active website, mostly comprised of a single form through which requests to view the archive can be sent. However, responses are rarely forthcoming and only one journalist has been able to report a confirmed viewing.

Devotees of Osta are known to pay tribute to her by laying wreaths in the sea at Amble, as close as possible for the public to get to Coquet Island. One incident was reported in which a woman sailed to Coquet Island on a stolen boat,[17] but no evidence of her presence has been uncovered. Coquet Island is owned by the Duke of Northumberland and is managed by the RSPCA as a bird reserve.

Works

Novels

Rivets (Lynch & Sons, 1999)

The Giantess (Lynch & Sons, 2001)

Virtute in Chains (Marion Boyars, 2007)

The Sea at Night (Anaetal, 2010)

Short stories

‘Elysium Discotheque’ (Nouvelle Review Française, February 2002)

‘Vermilions’ (Lettres Nouvelles, September 2002)

‘Vectors’ (Le Cahier des Saisons, March 2003)

‘La Société de Mardi Dernier’ (Ci Tron, April 2006)

External links

www.nexttuesdaysociety.org (website of The Next Tuesday Society)

References

1. Rose, D. (2006). Rose’s Compendium of Forgotten Writers. Miéville House.

2. Stogner, Bourgnet (2013). Dark Waters—De-Mapping in the novels of Nulla Osta: A Statistical Analysis. Private

press.

3. Stirling, Lee (2009) A Bunch of Cults: Reappraising the Unpraised. Emerald.

4. About The Next Tuesday Society “http://www.nexttuesdaysociety.org/about” Retrieved on 1 April 2022.

5. Endicott, Jareth (2015). Dead Authors & Dead Ends. Orbital.

6. Allan, Jan (2017). Soho Poetical: A Memoir. Soho Press.

7. Allan, ibid.

8. Allan, ibid.

9. Allan, ibid.

10. Abernathy, R. (ed). Nils Frame: The Collected Reviews. Mordecai-Mordam.

11. Allan, ibid.

12. Allan, ibid.

13. ‘Conversations with Writers’. The Guardian. 11 September 2018.

14. ‘In Brief.’ Times Literary Supplement. 1 August 2010.

15. ‘Notable Releases.’ The Guardian, 15 November 2010.

16. Allan, ibid.

17. ‘Crime Round-Up.’ Amble Community Newspaper. 24 March 2021.

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