A Beginner's Guide to Acting English Read online

  Mrs Oliver explained what had happened to Mrs Davenport.

  'I see,' said Mrs Davenport, looking more serious than I had ever seen her before. 'And where is Ela now?'

  Ela was being looked after in the welfare room and was too upset to leave just yet. I tried to tell myself that being able to sit in the cosy quiet of the welfare room all afternoon was almost worth the humiliation. The room was a small, curtained-off part of the cloakrooms. It was a sanctuary away from the noise and regimen of the school. Mrs Burns, the welfare lady, kept a big bowl of diluted Dettol in the corner for cuts and grazes. The comforting smell of cotton wool soaked in Dettol filled the air. But it wasn't worth it. I knew it wasn't.

  Zenith and I had to say that it was Andrew Nelson who pulled Ela's knickers down and we told her which girls held down her arms and which kids were shouting 'gerrumoff!' I didn't tell her I stood and watched the whole thing and didn't even notice when Zenith ran off to call a grown-up. Andrew's mother had to come and pick him up from school. That was really serious trouble when they had to do that. Mrs Davenport said that just a year ago he would have been given the slipper.

  We sat with Ela in the welfare room. Ela never once said, 'I saw you laughing there, Shaparak,' which made me feel really bad and I wished I was good like Zenith. I heard Mrs Davenport tell the welfare lady that Ela's mum couldn't pick her up because she was at work. Not many mums were at work, but Ela's mum and dad were divorced and her dad lived in Luton. Zenith and I were allowed to stay in the welfare room with Ela for the rest of the day and play snakes and ladders and other board games we had to play when it was wet outside.

  Mrs Oliver came to see us in the welfare room before she went home after lunchtime. She fussed over Ela a bit then said, 'Shaparak, can I have a word with you please outside?'

  This was it; I was in trouble after all. With my heart in my mouth, I followed Mrs Oliver out into the cloakroom where it was quiet and no one could hear us. She crouched down on the floor in front of me.

  'Shaparak, you saw what was happening to Ela, didn't you?'

  I nodded.

  'And you didn't help her, did you?'

  An ice-cold bucket of shame poured over my head and trickled right through me, down to my toes. I was sure my whole body had turned purple. Why had I not been punished along with everyone else who had to stay in each break time for a week and do homework? Why had Mrs Oliver left me to think I'd got away with it when I hadn't? Zenith was able to chatter away to Ela and be relaxed and calm, but since it happened, I'd had a knot of dread in my stomach because no one had told me off. It had been torture and Mrs Oliver knew the whole time.

  'Don't worry,' I heard her say through my fog of panic. 'You are not in trouble because I know that you are a very nice little girl but you haven't got the confidence the other children have. It's not easy coming from another country is it?'

  I had no idea what being Iranian had to do with this but things seemed to be going my way so I was happy to go along with whatever theory Mrs Oliver had come up with if it meant getting out of trouble.

  'But Zenith is from a different country too and she knows that just because you want to fit in, it doesn't mean you have to join in with all the mean things the normal children do. It's perfectly okay to stick to your guns and say "No! This is wrong and I'm going to fetch the dinner lady."'

  I looked at my feet and looked sad and sorry even though on the inside I was full of relief because I was going to get away with it.

  'You are a very sweet little girl and I know you didn't mean any harm so we'll say no more about it.'

  Then she kissed the top of my head and told me I could go back to Zenith and Ela. I was very lucky that I was small and made grown-ups feel sorry for me.

  Kiss-chase was banned in our playground after that.

  'My family are going back to India to live.' Zenith said it so casually as she painted a door on to our Tudor house.

  'For ever?' I asked.

  She nodded

  'For ever and ever?'

  To my dismay, she nodded again and just carried on painting.

  I didn't know much about India, just that the elephants had small ears and my best friend was going to live there.

  My mother told Zenith's mother how sad I was. Zenith's mother said in her sing-song accent, 'Zenith can write to you from Bombay, and we'll come and visit London many times and see you.'

  This wasn't a comfort. Zenith's mother hadn't even let me take an extra balloon from her party for my own brother so she did not understand friendship.

  I was right. I never saw Zenith again. I had to finish the Tudor house on my own. My colouring in was really messy compared to hers and I couldn't draw the straight lines as neatly as she could.

  Zenith had said if you draw things small it looks as if they are far away so in honour of my friend I got a little adventurous and I drew birds in the distance, just their shape; they were too far away to see in detail. They ended up like giant black eyebrows overlooking the house. I tried to cover them up, I drew white billowing clouds over them, to hide them, but the black of my eyebrow birds mixed in with the white paint and made my clouds angry and grey. The Tudor house was in a strange place where it was very sunny and thundery at the same time.

  At the end of term, all the pairs of artists fought over who got to keep their giant paintings. With Zenith gone, I took mine home with no fuss.

  'That's a wonderful painting!' Baba cried when I rolled it out on the living-room floor to show him. 'What detail! What colours!'

  He pointed out all the parts that he thought were especially good, the roofs, the windows, the perfect brown front door; all the things that Zenith had drawn. He couldn't work out what the grey splodges on top of the roofs were and why there appeared to be a king floating beside a table. When I told him, Baba said perspective did not matter as much as ambition and I had painted a very ambitious picture. He was genuinely proud. Baba had the picture framed and hung it on the living-room wall so it was the very first thing guests saw when they came in the room. Baba said true artists sign their pictures, so I did: 'Shaparak and Zenith –1978'.

  CINEMA REX

  Ordinary people were doing their best to stay out of the demonstrations and the crowds chanting anti-Shah slogans. Even though they didn't like him either, ordinary people who were mothers and grandmothers and bakers and tailors or glamorous people who liked to wear expensive jewellery and go to parties, all tried to carry on as normal, leaving talk of a revolution to the revolutionaries. That was until Cinema Rex was burned down. The fire was started deliberately.

  Cinema Rex was in a poor district of Abadan. Four hundred and thirty people were in the cinema, eating pistachio nuts and pumpkin seeds, while watching the film. The doors were locked from the outside before the place was set alight. All four hundred and thirty people died. They were either burned or trampled to death as the crowd frantically tried to break down the barricaded doors. The residents of Abadan reported smelling burning flesh for miles around.

  Everyone blamed the Shah's secret police, the SAVAK. The Shah had a motive. He funded film production on the understanding that the films showed the monarchy in a good light. The film being shown at Cinema Rex that day did not. It was Gavaznha – The Deer – a controversial film starring Behrouz Voussoghi.

  The Shah was so unpopular that in ordinary people's eyes this was a clear attempt to bring down the Islamists. 'He's burned down the cinema thinking we will blame the opposition,' people said.

  Islamists had already started smaller fires at other cinemas to protest against 'Western values' but no one thought they would massacre innocent people like this. This was definitely the Shah's doing and now the mothers and grandmothers and all the other ordinary people who had just wanted life to go on as normal realised it could not and they too spilled into the streets and chanted 'Marg Bar Shah!' – Down with the King! The burning of Cinema Rex was the final straw. The people wanted the Shah out.

  Afterwards, after the Shah
had fled and thousands of people had died in the revolution, after the mullahs established the Islamic Republic of Iran, there was a trial. The truth came out about the fire at Abadan's Cinema Rex. Four militant Islamists had sealed the exits and started the fire, knowing they would kill every man, woman and child inside. They knew the Shah would be blamed. They knew it would fuel a revolution.

  'Do you know what's happening in Iran right now?' Baba was always out now or on the phone late into the night and so, in the mornings, Maman only had us to talk to. 'There's going to be a revolution.'

  We walked either side of Maman on the way to school through Dead Man's Alley. Dead Man's Alley was a scary walkway that ran from Hanger Hill park right down to Montpelier school. Tina Hills said that it got its name because a dead man was found down there and now he haunted it and she should know because both her sisters, Lou and Gwen, were older than us and had been walking down it to school for years. I knew the ghost wouldn't come out in the morning when we were on the way to school because ghosts come out at night. Dead Man's Alley wasn't really a shortcut for us, it made our walk to school a bit longer from Marcourt Lawns, but if we had time, Maman would walk us down there as a treat.

  'There is going to be a revolution. We are going to get rid of the Shah,' Maman said. She said it more to herself than to me and Peyvand, who had charged ahead, kicking up the leaves.

  You had to be really careful down the alley, not just because of ghosts and murders, but because it was narrow and dark because there was nowhere for the leaves from the overhanging branches to go but on top of each other.

  Iran was on the grown-up news and even on John Craven's News Round. Our telephone rang and rang, much more than usual when the news came on. 'Hadi! Watch the news! They are showing Iran!'

  'I know I know! Nader just rang to tell me!'

  'Yes! I rang and told Nader! Turn it on!'

  The second the phone was put down, somebody else would call. 'BBC1! Iran! Iran!' The news reports did not last as long as it took for all the Iranians in London to tell each other about them. While Baba was frantically making and receiving calls, he shouted at me and Peyvand 'Bacheha! The news! Iran! Come translate!'

  Peyvand and I would run to help. Whenever Baba or Maman shouted 'IRAN!' we knew we had to stop whatever we were doing immediately and run to translate the news. It was hard to follow what Angela Rippon was saying and even harder to translate into Farsi, but we'd try. 'The people are chanting in the street.'

  'I know that! What is the newscaster saying?'

  'She says they're saying "Down with the Shah".'

  'What else? What else?'

  Maman, in her apron and with her fish-slice in her hand, would say, 'Leave the poor kids alone! It's obvious what they are saying, people are in the streets, they want the Shah to go.'

  We could understand the crowd better than the newsreader. Once they showed people holding up pictures of an old man in a white beard chanting 'Long live Khomeini'.

  'Who is that?' Peyvand asked.

  'A religious man,' Maman answered.

  'Is he a goodie?' we asked

  'That's enough, children, now go and play.' Baba remembered that we were only six and seven and relieved us of our translating duties.

  'Enghelab! Pray for people in Iran, Shappi Jaan, we're going to have a revolution!' Deep down in the telephone Dayee Masood sounded excited.

  'Do you still buy double-lollipop ice creams, Dayee?' 'Of course, Shappi Jaan, I eat one every day and think of you.'

  'Don't get fat, Dayee!'

  I wondered if Jaleh had met the rest of the family yet.

  'Marg Bar Shah! Marg Bar Shah!' Masood was in the street. He was rallying supporters against the Shah. People spilled into the narrow streets, young and old alike. Some were still in their house slippers.

  Children ran out to join the mob. A mother fought her way through the demonstrators calling out to her nine-year-old son who had darted into the crowd. Hearing her calls of 'Farhad! Farhad! Pesaram!' demonstrators near the boy grabbed his arm. 'Is that your mother calling you? Stay here until she finds you.' Catching up at last the woman grabbed her boy's hand and dragged him back towards home. 'This is no place for a child, don't you dare run off again.'

  Masood called out on his megaphone, 'Brothers and sisters! Come join us! Let's put an end to this oppression, let's put an end to this dictator!'

  MARG BAR SHAH! Once a crowd was gathered, the throng moved as one through the streets, growing in number as they moved through west Tehran. Masood at the front, Masood leading the chanting, Masood stirring the crowd up to boiling point. By the time they had reached the park, they numbered in their thousands.

  The Shah's uniformed soldiers were trying to disperse the crowd. A little boy who had been luckier than Farhad in giving his mother the slip picked up a stone and hurled it at a soldier. Other missiles were thrown. The soldiers fired into the air. Women screamed but the crowd stayed together. The soldiers were trying to drown Masood out with their own orders. 'Disperse! Disperse or we'll shoot!'

  'WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN!' Masood's voice rang out.

  Another splattering of gunfire. Different screams, not of surprise or fear, but agony. The soldiers were firing into the crowd. A man was struck in the chest and leg, a young woman was shot in the head and fell on the ground. More screaming. Her brothers were calling for help. The demonstrators could do nothing against gunfire but disperse.

  Mitra came to live with us just around the time when Iran began to be on the news. She was an art student. She was eighteen and Baba knew her brother so she came to stay with us while she studied. Mitra was very pretty with long brown hair, huge brown eyes and freckles on her nose. Hardly any Iranian people had freckles. Maman got a few in the summer but Mitra had them all year round. I loved to sit on her lap while she watched TV and count them.

  While Maman and Peyvand talked to people on the phone back in Iran, I went into the kitchen with Mitra and she gave me some bakhlava she'd brought over with her. Mitra had a pierced nose, but Maman said it wasn't because she was a punk but because she was an artist and artists sometimes did things like that but I was never allowed to get my nose pierced even if I became an artist. I didn't mind. I didn't want my nose pierced and Peyvand was the one who was good at drawing anyway, not me.

  Once she got off the phone, Maman came to join me and Mitra in the kitchen and made some chai.

  Maman didn't know I had already had two pieces of bakhlava and offered me more. Mitra winked at me and didn't say anything. I loved Mitra. The diamond-shaped sweets were bound together by honey glue. Maman and Mitra were soon absorbed in talking about what was going on in Iran. I pulled away another piece and popped it in my mouth. The sticky pastry and crumbly pistachio melted in my mouth.

  'Is Dayee Masood going to marry Jaleh?' I asked.

  'How do you know about Jaleh?' Maman asked in surprise. She rolled her eyes at my taking the bakhlava, a warning not to take any more.

  'We saw her at the hammam. Maman Shamsi said everyone wants to marry Dayee Masood but I think Jaleh is the prettiest.'

  'Vai!' Maman shook her head. 'What things children pick up on!'

  'Masood? Is that your handsome brother, the one in the photo on the TV?' Mitra asked.

  Maman Shamsi had sent us a photo of Masood in his army uniform. Maman said that Mitra thought too much about boys. 'She had only been in London for five minutes and already had found a boyfriend!'

  Mitch was at art college with Mitra. He had long hair and played the guitar and had an earring in one ear. Maman and Baba liked him even though he was quite punky.

  'Yes he is and, no, he is not marrying Jaleh. Her whole family are Shahi, you know. I hear they've got her engaged now to a policeman. There are rumours he had connections with SAVAK. I hope Masood hasn't still got his eye on her, he could make trouble for himself. As it is I have my mother on the phone every day worrying about the boys.'

  Mitra was the first person who wasn't family but became like
family in our life in London. After Mitra, we made more friends like that. Friends who practically lived with us and called round any time they wanted and sat while Maman and Baba had one of their big fights without feeling they should leave. We had, in those first few years in London, Mitra, Banou, Simin and a few others who stayed our friends for ever, our new family in London.

  English people were all talking about the revolution in Iran now, not just we Iranians. It seemed to be all they knew about us. Apart from me, Maman, Baba and Peyvand, the only Iranians Mr Canning and Betty saw were the ones beating their breasts and burning pictures of the Shah on TV.

  'It's all kicked off in Iran, ain't it, Hadi?' Mr Canning kept a keen eye on the news for us and reported back his views on the situation. 'The Shah's days are numbered, eh? I take it you're not on his side then?'

  Baba poured a whisky for Mr Canning, who'd brought some of Betty's cakes up for me and Peyvand.

  'No, not at all. He is dictator.' Baba pronounced 'dic-ta-toor' the Iranian way, which Maman said was actually the French way, but Mr Canning knew what Baba meant.

  'Yes, I been reading all about it, 'e's got the old secret police ain't 'e.' He pursed his lips and sucked air through them. 'You don't wanna get on the wrong side of them, eh?'

  Baba had to guess what Mr Canning was saying a lot of the time, and Mr Canning had to guess what Baba was saying most of the time.

  'So Hadi, you fink this Ayatollah will be all right, do you?'