A Beginner's Guide to Acting English

by Shappi Khorsandi

  Baba spoke for hours each day on the telephone. Sometimes he would bellow and rant at the caller, pacing the floor as much as the cord would allow and wildly gesticulating, flinging his arms around even though the person on the other end could not see him. Just when you were sure he would slam the phone down in rage, he would be laughing and joking with the other person and the tightness in my chest would ease.

  Baba encouraged Peyvand and me to answer the phone. We said ''Allo?' when we picked up, then we had to go through the rigid Iranian etiquettes of saying how we were, how the family was and enquiring after the caller's health and that of his or her extended family. This could all take quite a while and Baba would hover over us, carefully instructing us and training us in the complex Persian etiquette.

  The telephone was the fifth, most demanding member of our family. Its shrill call had no concept of mealtimes or sleeping times and would constantly bring messages to Baba from around the world. Whatever we were saying, whatever we were doing, everything stopped for the telephone.

  It rang one afternoon when we had got home from school and were about to sit with a big bowl of pomegranate seeds and watch Grange Hill. ''Allo?' I got to the phone before Peyvand.

  'Is that Khorsandi's house?'

  It was a man's voice.

  'Yes.' I was quite curt. It was rude to just say 'Khorsandi' without saying 'agha' before it.

  'Is he your father?'

  'Yes, he is.' I got the feeling that I wanted to put the phone down but something made me keep it to my ear.

  'Does your daddy smoke opium?' His voice was mocking, nasty.

  The voice was being nasty. I wasn't going to let him know I cared. 'No, but my mum wears Opium, it's a very nice perfume.'

  That was witty of me. Even Peyvand might not have thought to say that.

  The man on the phone did not laugh, he didn't react to what I said. 'Your daddy is a bastard, a dirty motherfucking bastard.' He sounded very angry now. 'Death to your bastard father! D—'

  I slammed the phone down. I stared at the phone for a moment, then I walked calmly back to the living room to watch TV with Peyvand. I didn't tell Peyvand about the phone call. Baba was asleep and hadn't heard me answer. I told Maman it was a wrong number and she didn't press me about it, she was busy gutting fish for the next dinner party we were having.

  For the rest of the day I heard the man's voice in my head. 'Your daddy is a bastard.' The word 'daddy' sounded silly in an Iranian accent. Why didn't he just say 'Baba'?

  Now, the telephone's ring didn't sound as friendly as it did before. You didn't know when you picked it up if it was going to be Ida or Simin or Mr Esfahani or Iran, you just had to hope it wasn't someone saying horrible things. The man's swearing had shocked me. I hadn't heard an Iranian say those words before, only Kerry and Jake Tyler.

  Very early one Saturday morning, when Maman and Baba were still fast asleep, the telephone rang. Maman and Baba had had a big party the night before and when I fell asleep under the dining-room table at about midnight, people were still dancing and laughing and shouting. Baba or Maman must have carried me to bed and put me in my pyjamas because that's where I woke up.

  On Saturdays, Peyvand and I got up early, got our own breakfast and watched all the cartoons and kids' shows. Then, when the boring grown-up shows started, we played backgammon and ate crisps.

  Peyvand was beating me at backgammon as usual so I jumped up when the phone rang and ran to the hallway, grateful for the break in the game. It was sure to be Iran calling; they always called in the morning or late at night.

  ''ALLO?' I said loudly and clearly. There was silence at the other end. ''Allo?' I said again.

  This time a low man's voice. 'Is your father there?'

  'He's asleep,' I told the unfriendly voice. It made me feel uneasy. I wanted to put the phone down.

  'Tell your father, tell him I'm going to kill him.'

  'Shoma?' I asked. Who is calling?

  'Just tell him he is going to die.'

  Click. The voice was gone. I didn't realise I was trembling until I tried to put the phone back into the cradle. I froze, not really knowing what to do.

  Peyvand was calling. 'C'mon, Shap, hurry up, it's your go.'

  I ignored him and went into my parents' room. Baba was snoring. Maman had the cover over her head and was fast asleep. I touched Baba's shoulder. He growled, still asleep. I touched it again, pushing a little. I needed him to be awake, I needed him to know that there was someone coming to kill him but I also knew that you shouldn't wake someone up too suddenly, Maman had warned me that this could give them a shock and they might have a heart attack. I shook my father gently again.

  His big eyes opened, bulging with a hangover. 'What? Who is it, what's wrong?'

  He sat up in bed. I began to cry. I couldn't help it. I couldn't talk, I just let out a high-pitched wail. Baba jumped out of bed. 'What?! Where is Peyvand?'

  Peyvand peeked into the bedroom. 'Shap, what are you doing?'

  Maman was awake now. 'What's the matter, why are you crying?'

  Baba was out of bed. He pulled on his dressing gown and pulled me to him. 'What is it? What has happened?'

  I could hardly breathe I was so frightened. My sobs were dry and my chest hurt where my terror was stuck fast but I still managed to speak. I told my family about the man on the phone, that he was coming to kill Baba and that we all had to hide, maybe in the greenhouse at the bottom of the garden or in the cupboard under the stairs which you could lock from the inside.

  Maman and Baba fussed and cooed. Baba was laughing. 'It was just a crazy person who has our phone number, or it was one of Baba's friends playing a joke. You mustn't worry, nobody is coming to hurt us.'

  Maman and Baba shooed us back into the living room and started the day.

  'Bacheha!' Baba announced, 'we are going for an English breakfast, get dressed and let's go!'

  'GRANADA!' Peyvand and I squealed. The motorway service station served full English breakfasts. Because it was on the motorway, we could pretend we were on the way to Brighton or Worcester or some other place where we had brilliant holidays. We didn't mention the phone call again that day.

  The phone calls came every day. Baba didn't want me or Peyvand to answer it any more. I could tell when the calls were bad. Maman would either swear and put the phone down or just put it down without the swearing.

  Baba tried to talk to them. He didn't shout. He waited for them to stop shouting, then he spoke in that low frightening voice that Peyvand and I were terrified of.

  Baba's friends told him, 'Hadi, go to the police, you have to take this seriously. They have killed people with much less of a case history than yours.'

  Other people, friends with tumblers of whisky in their hands, cornered Baba at parties and in loud whispers told him, 'These people are not joking. You're a target, Hadi, they want to get you. You have to be careful.' Then the whispers got deeper and louder. 'They have targets in the West you know!'

  Baba tossed his head in the air dismissively. He would not stop publishing his little newspaper. We would continue to fold and label and stamp and drink tea with our friends, whatever the threats might be. I was scared by what everyone was saying about how they could get people in England. But Baba told me not to worry and so I pushed it to the back of my mind. Baba laughed and said nobody was going to harm him and did we want to go to Brighton at the weekend?

  Baba was not one of those dads who painted the shed at the weekend. We were not one of those families who had dinner at six and were all in bed by nine. Baba was always going to write, Maman was always going to cook for big parties and the mullahs were always going to hate us, whatever we did, so we might as well do what we wanted.

  I started to feel scared though. I started to feel really scared.

  Dear Ayatollah Khomeini,

  I am sorry this letter is not in Farsi. I can write Farsi, but I'm not very good at it. I get my letters muddled up and my handwriting is like a five-year-
old's. There is a girl at my Iranian school called Shaida Shaykhi and she reads and writes perfectly. Like a grown-up, and she's only half-Iranian!

  Anyway, I hope you are not cross that this letter is in English and I hope you have somebody to translate it for you. (My baba says you can probably speak French because you lived in Paris for so long but he's not sure if you can speak English.)

  The reason I am writing to you is because I know you are angry with my father and that is why we cannot go back to Iran to see my grandparents and cousins and it's why people keep phoning our flat and saying they are going to kill my baba.

  I don't want my baba to be killed because I love him very much. I know that you are angry because he wrote some jokes about you. I wanted to tell you that my baba makes jokes up about everybody, even me! He doesn't mean to be horrible or make anyone want to kill him.

  I am really sorry if my baba has written stuff that has upset you.

  I wanted you to know that if you met my baba, you would really like him. Everybody does. Even Shahi people.

  My baba is really funny. At parties, he makes everyone laugh really hard for ages and ages. Everybody loves him when they meet him.

  I'm sure my baba would stop writing jokes about you if you met him and became friends. My baba makes friends with everybody. I'm sure he would like you, you seem like a very nice man even though you look quite serious.

  Please don't kill my baba. If you put a bomb in his car or something like that, it might accidentally kill Peyvand, too. I love my baba but I love Peyvand even more. He is my brother and I don't want him to die until he is at least one hundred years old.

  Please come to London and come to our house for dinner (my maman is a brilliant cook) and you will see that my baba is really nice and not trying to take over Iran or anything like that. Our phone number is 998-0713.

  Yours sincerely

  Shaparak Khorsandi

  At school we'd learned to write proper letters so I wrote our address and the date on the top right-hand corner.

  I didn't know the Ayatollah's address so I just wrote 'To Ayatollah Khomeini, Tehran, Iran' on the envelope. The people at the post office were bound to know his exact address. Grace McAvoy wrote to the Queen once and just put 'The Queen, Buckingham Palace' on the envelope and she got a reply from one of her servants so it definitely got there. I put a first-class stamp on my letter and about five par avion stickers on it so it would get there by plane and not ship, which would take too long.

  TERRORISTS IN MADELEY ROAD

  I concentrated hard. If I really listened to every word Mr Peterson was saying I would have to understand. I stared at his face and he talked, he used his ruler to point at the diagrams he'd drawn on the blackboard. I knew I wasn't stupid. I read books all the time, big books for older girls, not just Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl. I just didn't get science or maths.

  'Did everybody get that?' Maths teachers always said that. What were you supposed to do? If you put your hand up and said 'I didn't', everyone would think you were thick and the teacher would then say 'Which bit didn't you get?' The only truthful answer to that was 'all of it' and if you said that, Teacher would think you were being cheeky. The only thing they ever did when you admitted you couldn't work something out was to get someone really good at maths like Penelope Sargin to get up and go through the whole sum again. What was the point of that except to make me feel even more stupid?

  'How come Penelope gets it and you don't?'

  Because Penelope's a swot with stupid plaits.

  I kept staring at Mr Peterson's face; it was sweating. It always did about five or six minutes into the class. When he was talking, if you happened to catch his eye, that was it, he would keep eye contact with you the whole time he was explaining something. It was really uncomfortable. You couldn't look away because it would be rude. There was something about Mr Peterson that made you not want to be rude or laugh at him. He was the youngest out of all our teachers, but the fattest. He never really shouted like the other teachers, except just once when Lee Windsor and Mark Johanssen-Berg were mucking around so much and not listening to him that he kicked two stools over and screamed, 'I can't take any more!' then ran out of the room. Mr Doran had to come out of his break in the staffroom and take over the class. Mr Peterson didn't come back to school for ages after that, about two or three weeks. We'd had a special talk from Mr Doran and Mrs Cawthorne the day before he came back about how Mr Peterson was 'a very sensitive young man' and that we were to do our best to be good and make him feel welcome.

  I stopped trying to understand and Mr Peterson's voice just became a drone. I was swinging my legs under the high science room tables. I thought about The King and I. The King was in love with Mrs Anna and I think she was in love with him too, but she'd never marry him because he had a million wives already and he wasn't English.

  'Shaparak!'

  I jumped and looked up. Mr Doran was in the classroom and both he and Mr Peterson were looking at me. How long had I been daydreaming?

  'Shaparak, can you come with me, please? It's okay, you can leave your books. I'm sure Penny won't mind clearing them away for you at the end of class.'

  I slid off my seat and followed Mr Doran out of the room. The only time I'd known a kid being taken home out of class like this by a teacher was when Susie Hampton's gran died. Her mum came to pick her up from school and she and Mrs Davenport came into the hall where we were having PE. Susie was in her vest and pants and halfway up the rope ladder when they came in. Her mum was crying and told her right after she'd climbed down from the ladder. Then Susie started crying. They found her pile of clothes and took her out of the hall then she wasn't back at school for three days.

  Everyone made such a fuss of Susie when she came back. She had been to the funeral and worn all black. I hadn't been to a funeral, I didn't know any dead people except for Dayee Masood, but he was in Iran, and Baba's baba, but I'd never even known him.

  'Is my grandmother dead?' I asked Mr Doran as we walked down the corridor.

  'No, silly, your granny's not dead, not as far as I know anyway,' he said.

  We went to the school foyer where Peyvand was already waiting.

  'Are we in trouble?' he asked. His teacher, Mrs Hill, hadn't told him anything either.

  'I don't think so. Your mum and dad have asked that you be taken home immediately. I don't think anyone has died, they didn't sound too worried.'

  'Now, neither of you worry, we are going to take you home,' Mrs Hill said.

  They let me take my Isle of Wight project with me, 'In case you are off for a while and can do some work on it.'

  This must be really serious then, if they think we'll be off school for a while. I clutched my folder to my chest. It was brilliant, for once I was really enjoying a project we did at school even though I just couldn't remember the name of some of the flowers that were native to the Isle of Wight. The names were in Latin, Mrs Cawthorne said. I don't know why they didn't give the flowers English names like 'daisy' and 'carnation', which were easy to remember.

  We were going to the Isle of Wight next term and so had to learn all about it. Peyvand had already been and said it was ace. You shared a room with your own friends and on the way, before you got on the ferry, you went on the HMS Victory, the real ship! Nelson's ship was kept in Portsmouth Harbour and you could look at where he slept and everything. Since our play about Horatio Nelson, I wanted to know everything about him and when Maman took us to Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons, I told her Nelson's whole story as he stood high up on his column looking out to sea.

  Mrs Hill took us home in her car. It was very messy, worse than Baba's. It smelled of cigarettes and there were newspapers and magazines all over the floor and an empty Coke can. I was very surprised and I could tell Peyvand was too. Mrs Hill was English; we had no idea they had messy cars too. I was quite relieved.

  Peyvand and I went to the side door of our house. The drain from the second floor was dripping as usual and the
dog from down the road had been there today and ripped open a black bin bag. It wasn't one of ours, we never got Shreddies, we got Sugar Puffs, Coco Pops and cornflakes.

  Peyvand opened the doors with his key. Baba had had one made for him in honour of him being old enough to walk home from school. I didn't have one yet. I only walked home if Peyvand was with me. We hurtled up the stairs to our flat and burst through the door. It was open as usual. There was no point shutting it until night-time because Baba and his friends were always up and down from the office.

  Maman ran in from the bedroom and threw her arms around us, hugging us tight.

  'What's wrong? What's going on?' I asked her, trying to make my voice sound normal and not as if I was in a panic.

  'Nothing's wrong, azizam,' Maman said. 'Why would you think anything is wrong?'

  Maman was a bad liar, just like Peyvand. She didn't giggle or stammer like Peyv did when he was lying, but you could tell instantly because her face went all obvious and she couldn't look you in the eye. I was a very good liar. I didn't stammer and I could look people in the eye. All you had to do was to act natural. Don't over-explain, don't say anything too complicated, just keep it simple. That was the best way to lie.

  'Your father is upstairs with some guests, go up and see them right now, please,' but then she made us wait until she prepared a tray for us to take upstairs. Three glasses of chai, and a plate of zoolbia bamieh, delicious, rich, Iranian sweets dripping with gooey syrup.

  Peyvand carried the tray upstairs. There were two Englishmen in Dad's office, sitting on the small sofa in the corner. Baba was jolly, over-jolly, when we came in. 'Ahhhh! My children!' he exclaimed. He gave us each a noisy kiss on our cheeks and ushered us inside.

  The two Englishmen put down their cups in their saucers and stood up to greet us. They were so tall. Really tall. Taller than Andrew and Christopher Nelson's dad. They shook hands with Peyvand and me as our dad introduced them. 'This is Inspector Taylor and Inspector MacDonald, they are policemen.'