SUPER STARS

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Olympia Press

8A Hawthorn Road

London N8 7NA

This book is dedicated to

Christine Fisher

Traveller’s Tales

An Olympia Press Book

‘’When you wake on a

Mars, then at least you’ll know

you’ve come home, Germaine’’

Billie Strange

Contents

Superstars … Andrea Mars….. 15

Obsession … Frank Réage ….. 41

Rain … Henry Maugham….. 79

These fine stories are brought to you by

The Travellers Companion Series’ of The Olympia Press, London.

Olympia Press London has a direct bloodline which it traces back to days with Maurice Girodias, the son of Olympia’s original founder after he opened Olympia’s first office in London in nineteen-seventy.

Olympia maintains a stable of fine writers, and these volumes, the forerunners of many others, will we hope introduce you to the new ideas, high literary merit, and straight-through quality authorship with which Olympia has become entirely synonymous.

Not for nothing was Olympia awarded the accolade by The New York Times

‘A literary enterprise which has profoundly influenced contemporary writing and culture’

SuperStars

Andrea Mars

SUPER STARS

The God Shiva was sent to the top of mount Kailash to brood; and he spent his days of solitude in contemplation and in the arms of hallucination. Thus, his followers still journey in the land that today is called Himachal Pradesh. To find that sustenance - which grows, cultivated or not, - in the far, free valleys.

There is a wonderful light which settles around the mountains of the Himalaya at sunset.

She was lost for a moment, completely forgetting to even try and photograph the beauty of the scene as the light sank progressively behind the immense rock faces, finally leaving merely the smallest imprint on the high snowline, still above her. Flooding the Kulu Valley with deep thickets of darkness.

Too late she remembered and then looked for the now useless camera. They were calling her:

"The light will be gone very soon"

"It's dangerous!"

She struggled to the edge of the path, and bade swift farewell to the mountains for a small rare shared instant.

The four of them bustled along the path, and after a couple of kilometers it began to change bit-by-bit from fine slippery shale to coarse chips of granite.

As the heat faded from the sky it moved from gentle cerulean to deep powder blue, to darkest ivory black: simultaneously the temperature changed from shaded deep warmth to a freezing knife, edged by rising wind. Unprompted, her teeth chattered. Down at the level of the treeshadows they became cocooned in dark, thus they slid and clutched at one another for support.

By now the light had faded almost to nothing, and Jonathan made to find the torch in his pack. Then, in the rich ultra-violet of absolute darkness she saw the colour of a bright turban and the fast grimace of

teeth against sable; a stranger walked with and bye them for a moment, hefting the slicked curve of a cutlass.

“No lights here, Baba!”

The whiff of a forgotten perfume, the light swirl of breath or charris smoke.

Roses.Then he was gone.

"Phew!" said Erica, in the darkness, "Jon, didn't you know that a light around here gives some crazy Bandicoot a target!"

They walked in now sweating silence for some apparently considerable time.

"Where the hell is the town?"

"Look at the map!"

"Don't be stupid!"

“Oh, for Chrissake!"

"Let's just stay on the path"

More silence.

"Chrissake!"

She could see the glittering umbras of lights reflected against foliage somewhere in the pathway ahead. It must have been the heightened sensitivity of her eyes, finally accustomed to the utter shade, for none of the others saw a thing for quite a time.

Much crunching and cussing amongst the sharp shards of rock upon the now softening surface.

Moments later.

“Lights!", said Jonathan.

Unexpectedly, the subtle curves of the pathway opened out within a few hundred metres and then they passed the low outlines of the usual wattle and stone dwellings.

It may have been her imagination, she thought, but she could swear that she could clearly but indistinctly hear the sounds of music: the zip of the strings, the pad of the Tabla. Sounds of merriment and movement in accents strange for this north-west facing place so bedecked by mountains.

"Nothing will surprise me!" said Jonathan, adjusting his short-sighted glasses and stopping to examine the map with minute, fingertip accuracy, digit pointing at lost details.

"It's not there", said Erica, "I looked".

Indeed the town, or whatever it was, was indeed not on their map.

"Well!" said Jonathan, "And the bloody thing cost me 10 Rupees in Delhi!"

"What’11 we do now?" said Felix.

"Go towards the music!" said she, logically.

As is normal amongst truly high mountains, the large building they thus found had the shape of a squared circle, the broken entrance end rather in the manner of a fortifiable gateway, though presently now ajar, or even open. Through the trellis so created she could see the outline of at least one battered motor vehicle of unknown provenance.

The sounds deepened and became richer as they walked through the gate and entered the courtyard proper.

"Bon-jewer!" said a small voice at her knee. She jumped.

When she looked down she found a brown, small face regarding her with earnestness.

"Can you speak English?" she said.

"I speak English good!" said the child - "Je ve

retour a' ma maman".

And then disappeared into the shadows.

The music and a certain scattered melee of voices issued from the central part of the structure before them.

They had a brief parley before entering.

"Can't find it on the map at all!"

"We'll ask 'em"

"Must be some bloody old Hill Station"

"We'd better ask to stay the night or something"

"Looks enormous"

"I'll ask", she said.

"Okay"

They mounted the steps and she pushed the door.

After many days walking in the mountains, none of them could have foreseen the scene which greeted them.

The series of rooms which now presented themselves had the same character that one might expect were one to use the exteriors of the houses in this place as a reference point: but despite the antiquity and obsolescence of the basic fittings, the tables which kitted-out two of the rooms, and the elemental counter in the other main one seemed to be modern in concept if not in execution.

Kitchen noises issued from an invisible end, possibly a one time stable, while the resultant wisps of charcoal smoke filtered in and gave the interior an indescribably comfortable aroma.

At the centre of another smaller room sat a small band, Sitar, Tabla and a sort of fiddle. A group of people watched a dancer in rapt attention, and the sounds of the instruments penetrated the ramshackle walls of that small room and created a sort of stereo in the others so that the singer and the dancer had a perfect audio stage upon which to perform.

The audience of ten or a dozen sat in rapt concentration, and a small man with a wizened, stressed face came forward to greet the new arrivals, with no sign of surprise.

"Have a seat ...Have a seat!"

The little brown man's wizened face had a moment of tension in the eyes.

They sat down and took a long time to completely believe that a place like this could really exist in such an out of the way spot.

Among the clientele was a smattering of English, German and French speakers: and the hive of children served, harangued, flirted with the clients and made them laugh.

"Have a seat ...Have a seat! ...there".

The little brown man's wizened face welcomed another stranger, in from the dark. They stayed that night and several more. Nights with freezing clear black skies: often star shine reflected bright enough to caste sharp shadows.

Next night; black as pitch save for that intense starshine: then an enormous comet or shooting star carving it’s way in a vast curve across the dome over her head, leaving, stopping (or dying) as it approached the snow peaks to her left. She privately now called the place Super Stars; set, as it was there high among many stars, never mentioning that fact to a soul. Privately; told absolutely no-one, it was her own, secret affair. Anyway, she was surprised at her own gaucheness. And as she began to get to know the man, Tashi, and his many children, she in her turn felt curiously comfortable with his presence, for no good reason. Lost days in those Himalayas. There was a sense of loss in it for some unknown reason. By day the sun was extraordinarily hot, and one's skin seemed to dry in the extreme surface heat, broken only by fluttering scurries of wind.

The wind, which by day came mostly in gusts, complimented as it were, by the prayer flags long ago torn to the shreds by the weight of the prayers they carried to it, and which lined the edges of the compound thus signalling to anyone who cared to think, that this was a place of refuge for those lost men from the north. That next night the place filled with strange strong-smelling people with slit eyes and greased or buttered hair and deeply lined, tanned skins, some of them women; Tashi said:

"They are friends of mine, on the run from the Chinese in our home." In a matter-of-fact way.

She took this to be Tibet. He fingered his wrist and gave her a thin skein of colours to bind around hers:

"This is my blessing-I got it from a Holy Man on the Yak route when I came here. The way to the Stars".

She knew enough to know that that was in itself a great favour from a devout follower of The Holy One, The Lord, and was touched by his gentleness...

The crowd that night then were countrymen from this area of the mountains: mountain men, who ordered tea with butter, eschewed any Spirit or alcohol; who paid merely Paice for their pleasures; who smoked Charris after their choice was finished, to dispel the days fatigues.

These people smiled at you with gap-toothed mouths; their hair was black and lank, their clothing voluminous, and though tattered and worn it was yet rich and sumptuous; a species of rich wool brocade.

By day such people would spent hours chanting gentle deep rhythms to themselves, whirling their prayer wheels absentmindedly while smoking twisted bitter black cheroots or reading a holy script... and sometimes Tashi, too would change his busy personality and become one of them.

Strangers of this nature maintained within themselves a sense of silence, of deep psychic repose, which she envied and which she had always sought.

But then, by night, Tashi's residence, or Hill Station, call it what you will, was a hive of industry. Every evening the non-native 'locals' would seek out amusement for themselves.

Also a circumstantial number of travellers, who treated it much as it must originally, been intended to be used - as an inn along their way.

It also seemed that pleasure seekers came great distances, attracted perhaps by word of mouth to such a rare place, forgotten by the map makers for long enough to develop a certain cult attraction.

Often in the afternoons, Europeans and other strangers, unlikely and sometimes illegal residents, some gaunt followers of Shiva, some junkies who had journeyed north to refurbish their supplies: people with nothing better to do, would arrive in the courtyard and make a day of it.

To amuse themselves these visitors would teach the children their languages or sometimes play one of the incomprehensible blocking-games so common in those mountains: (and brought there, she had heard said, by stragglers from Alexander’s army, two millennia past.) Or they would revert to the bad manners of smoking some Hash, or having gone native, chewing a little Bhang to jolly the day along, or perhaps scorching a pellet of Opium to forget the day entirely. Time moves slowly if at all, in the Himalaya; and Bhang and Opium, after all, are cheap, if you don't need them.

This behaviour, however, was much frowned-upon by the locals, who sat drinking tea in the shade of the ramshackle verandah and discussing such ill behaviour in their inscrutably unmoving way.

Aah, but by night the place was always full to its capacity. Money remained yet to be made. Lots of it, even if only in small Peice's.

Then, unexpectedly; the unlikely, unprompted. Answering a vagrant thought of hers.

"One day," said Tashi, "I shall retire!"

"Why?" she said

"Because I've been doing this for several years and I hate all the busy-ness every night", he said, in his sing-song way shaking his head from left to right as if to reinforce his words.

"So you must be a rich man now ..I mean, you must be making lots of money".

A smile.

"Oh yes, but richness is relative to the mind", he said, flashing uneven teeth pitted by sugar, and being a Bhuddist, and true.

On her last night there in the mountains she saw, as if in confirmation of her thoughts, Tashi empty the evening’s takings of Rupees and Peice' into a large earthenware pot, and take it with him up the stairs to the room where he slept amongst his family.

"Where does he put it all?" she thought, knowing him to be an astute businessman.

But Tashi was above all, a native of that huge land to the north, Tibet, and she must remember that.

It was a long time before she visited those Himalayas again: perhaps as long as five or six years. And she found the place sadly changed, the Inn now turned to a house used only by travellers from the local highlands, and her friend Tashi and his family gone. No one seemed to know how or where. Bhang and Opium leave nothing behind them, not even memories.

And so it was that one later day she found herself (as a result of the breakdown of the TATA bus for the umpteenth time)abandoning the transport in irritation and choosing to reach the end of the line - a town called Mussouri many miles from the great Himalaya, lacking its wonder and majesty, by other means (in this case one of those ox-carts with ancient motor wheels).

Tired. Aimless. A little sad, she knew not for what, exactly.

But, she must first survive, that message would run through her mind constantly from now on and forever.

So first she found a place to stay: a pretty little room on a roof, precarious, but cool by night. Cheap,too. Showered, using the normal arrangement of a bucket and tepid water.

Now she wandered through the seraglio of the bazaar, packed with tourists from the Diasporas, and plains of central India; well-off people, matching the fact that she herself felt much better off in her mind, and much more secure in herself. Relaxed.

Suddenly she saw something in the corner of her eye. Someone she recognized.

For some reason.

And yet now, she walked across the bazaar slowing her pace through arguing crowds, past bartering faces, cheap tourist items much as you would find in any market, anywhere.

And, inescapably, there he sat...

A wizened, brown face with a slight smile, gazing at her with only the smallest sign of recognition.

The seller of cheap garish knitted garments lay against the wall and enjoyed the sun.

"Hello", he said. "Hullo …I was expecting you!"

"Were you, really?"

"Of course"

"I'm surprised to see you"

"It’s a long way from the Kulu Valley"

"Then you really are Tashi?"

"Yes, Missy"

She was amazed at the change in his life. For now he sold worthless garments and took a pittance home each night - yet if he had stayed at the Hill Station he would have remained a rich man.

Curiosity killed the cat.

She rationalized;

‘He is simply returning to what all his fellows would do: perhaps it’s group pressure?’ – she could not know, never would; but:

"May I ask why you stopped running your lovely restaurant?"

"The rastaurant, yaas.." Tashi thought for a moment then gave a gesture of abandon. Thought again then smiled... "Ah! That!" As if it were a truly distant though bright star, not yet quite faded in his mind.

"Did it all fall through, burn down - what?"

"Oh no", he said, patting the ground about him as if he were preparing to balance a particularly tricky piece of hi-tech furniture there-“…Oh no! You see missy, it was that I couldn’t bear the work, the worry, the stress, he searched for the words for a moment and then his eyes lit up–“The Fame…!”

He looked all at once enormously happy as if he had found the right place after a long search;

“I couldn’t stand the bloody fame!”

And then an almost secret, yet exposed moment of smiling laughter.

She must have looked astonished then.

And then he elaborated:

“And you called my place Super Stars!”

Now they both laughed.

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