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3 Amma throws her coffee in a bin and walks directly towards the theatre, past the concrete skateboarding area emblazoned with graffiti it's way too early for the youngsters to begin their death-defying leaps and twists without helmets or protective knee pads the young, who are so fearless like Yazz, who goes out cycling without a helmet

who storms off when her mother tells her that wearing a helmet might be the difference between a/ getting a headache b/ learning to talk again she enters the stage door, greets the security guard, Bob, who wishes her well for tonight, makes her way through the corridors and up the stairs and eventually on to the cavernous stage she looks out at the empty, auditory wilderness of the fan-shaped auditorium, modelled on the Greek amphitheatres that ensured everyone in the audience had an uninterrupted view of the action over a thousand people will fill the seats this very evening so many people gathered to see her production is quite unbelievable the entire run almost sold out before a single review has been filed how's that for demand for something quite different? The Last Amazon of Dahomey, written and directed by Amma Bonsu where in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women warriors served the king women who lived in the king's compound and were supplied with food and female slaves who left the palace preceded by a slave girl ringing a bell warning men to look away or be killed who became the palace guard because men couldn't be trusted not to chop off the king's head or castrate him with a cutlass while he slept who were trained to climb naked over thorny acacia branches to toughen up who were sent into the hazardous forest for nine days to survive on their own who were crack shots with muskets and could behead and disembowel their enemies with ease who fought the Yoruba next door and the French who came to colonize who grew to an army of six thousand, all formally married to the king who were not otherwise permitted sexual relations and any male child born to them was killed off on first hearing about this Amma decided they must have been at it among themselves because wasn't that the case when the sexes are

segregated? and the idea of her play was born the last Amazon is Nawi, who enters the stage as a vulnerable teenage bride presented to the king; unable to bear his child, she's cast out of his bedchamber and forced to join his female combat troops where she survives the hazardous induction and rises up the ranks through her powerful physicality and cunning battle strategies to become a legendary Amazon general who shocked foreign observers with her fearless ferocity Amma shows Nawi's loyalty to her many women lovers long after she tires of them, making sure the king assigns them lightweight domestic duties rather than kick them out of the compound to a life of destitution at the end of the play, old and alone, Nawi reconnects with her past lovers, who fade in and out as spectres, courtesy of holograms she relives the wars where she made her name, including the ones the king instigated to provide captors for the abolished slave trade in the Americas, with outlaw slave ships outrunning the blockades in order to do business with him she's proud of her achievements video projections show her battles in action, thunderous armies of charging Amazons brandishing muskets and machetes hollering and swelling towards the audience spine-chilling, terrifying in the end there is Nawi's death lights slowly fading to blackout Amma wishes Dominique could have flown over to see a play she was the first to read ten years ago when Amma wrote it a play that's taken this long to get staged because every company she sent it to turned it down as not being right for them and she couldn't bear the thought of resurrecting Bush Women Theatre to put it on when Dominique left, she was left to steer the battleship alone

which she did for a few years, feeling abandoned, never finding someone to replace Dominique who had provided the practical solutions to Amma's creative ideas she dismantled the company in the end and went freelance Shirley her oldest friend will be here tonight, she's attended every one of Amma's shows since she was a teenager, has been a constant in her life since they met as eleven-year-olds at grammar school when Shirley, the only other brown girl in the school, made a beeline for her in the playground when Amma was standing alone one lunchtime amid the excitement of green-uniformed girls screeching and whooping and having fun skipping with ropes and playing hopscotch and games of tag there was Shirley standing before her Shirley, with perfectly straightened hair, her face so shiny (Vaseline, Amma later discovered), with her perfectly-knotted school tie, white socks pulled up to her knees so composed, so neat, so nice-looking unlike Amma's own messy hair, mainly because she was unable to stop unpicking the two braids her mother plaited for her every morning or stop her socks slipping down to her ankles because she couldn't help rubbing one foot against the other leg and her school cardigan was three sizes too big because her mother had made it to last three years hello, she said, my name's Shirley, do you want me to be your friend? Amma nodded, Shirley took her hand and led her to the group she'd just left who were playing rubber band skipping they were inseparable after that, Shirley paid attention in class and could be relied on to help out with homework Shirley listened for hours to Amma talking about the crushes she had on boys, and later, after a transitional bisexual period (with brief crushes on Shirley's brothers Errol and Tony), girls Shirley never had a negative word to say about her sexuality, covered for her when she bunked off school and listened avidly to her tales from the youth theatre – the smoking, snogging, drinking, acting – in that order, even

when their paths forked after school, Shirley into teaching, Amma into theatre, they maintained their friendship and even when Amma's arty friends said Shirley was the dullest person on the planet and did she have to invite her? Amma stood up for Shirley's ordinariness she's a good person, she protested Shirley babysat Yazz whenever she was asked (Amma also babysat Shirley's girls once or twice, maybe?) Shirley never once complained when Amma needed to borrow money to pay off her debts, which she sometimes wrote off as birthday presents it felt one-way for a long time, until Amma reasoned she made Shirley's safe and predictable life more interesting and scintillating and that was what she gave back then there were the members of her group or squad, as Yazz corrects her, no one says group of friends, Mum, it's so, like, prehistoric? she misses the people they used to be, when they were all discovering themselves with no idea how much they might change in the years to come her group came to her opening nights, were at the end of a phone (landline, of course – how did that work back then?) for a spontaneous night out were there to share and stir-up dramas Mabel was a freelance photographer who went straight once she hit her thirties, ditched all her lesbian friends as part of her reinvention as probably the first black, Barbour-wearing, horse-riding housewife in the Shires Olivine went from being un-castable in Britain because she was so dark to landing a major crime series in Hollywood and living the life of a star with ocean views and glossy magazine spreads Katrina was a nurse who returned to Aberdeen where she belonged, she said, became a born-again Anglophile, married Kirsty, a doctor, and refuses to come down to London Lakshmi will be here tonight, a saxophonist who composed for their shows, before deciding there was nothing worse than a song and a tune and began to put the niche into avant garde and play what Amma privately

thinks of as bing-bang-bong music, usually headlining weird festivals in remote fields with more cows than punters in attendance Lakshmi has also developed an improbable guru persona for the gullible students she tutors at music college who gather around the hearth of her council flat sipping cheap cider from tea cups while she sits cross-legged on the sofa in flowing robes, long hair streaked with silver denouncing chord progressions in favour of micro-tonal improvisation and poly-tempic, poly-rhythmic and multi-phonic structures and effects while declaring that composition is dead, girls and boys I'm all about the contemporary extemporary even though Lakshmi is approaching sixty, her chosen lover, male or female, remains in the 25–35 age range, at the upper end of which the relationship ends when Amma calls her on it, she comes up with a reason other than that they're no longer quite so impressionable, fresh-faced and taut-skinned then there was Georgie, the only one who didn't survive into the nineties a plumber's apprentice from Wales, she was abandoned by her Jehovah's Witness family for being gay she became the lost orphan child they all took under their wing the only woman in a council's plumbing team, she had to endure constant innuendo from her male colleagues with their jokes about screw hole locators, blow bags, nipples and ballcocks as well as comments on what they'd like to do with her arse when she was fixing something under a sink or peering down a gutter Georgie drank two litres of Coca Cola a day and mixed it with spirits and drugs at night she was the least lucky of their group in attracting women, and sadly, stupidly, thought she'd be on her own forever many a night out ended in tears with Georgie saying she was too ugly to pull, which wasn't true, they all endlessly reassured her how attractive she was, although Amma considered her more Artful Dodger than Oliver Twist

which in the lesbian world wasn't such a bad thing Amma can never forget the last time she saw her, both of them sitting on the kerb outside the Bell as the revellers drifted drunkenly off while Amma forced a finger down Georgie's throat to make her regurgitate the pills she'd taken in the toilets for the first time in their friendship, Amma actually showed her frustration with her friend for being such a hopeless case, for being so insecure, for not being able to cope with adulthood, for getting off her face all the time, it's time to grow up, Georgie, it's time to grow the fuck up! a week later she went over the top floor balcony on the Pepys Estate in Deptford where she lived to this day, Amma wonders how Georgie died did she fall (accident), fly (tripping), throw herself off (suicide) or was she pushed (unlikely) she still feels guilty, still wonders if it was her fault Sylvester always shows up on first nights, if only for the free booze at the after-party even though a few days ago he accused her of selling out when he cornered her outside Brixton tube station on her way home from rehearsal and persuaded her to have a drink with him at the Ritzy where they sat in the upstairs bar surrounded by posters of the independent films they'd been going to see together since they first met as students at drama school films like Pink Flamingos, starring the great drag queen, Divine, Born in Flames, Daughters of the Dust, Farewell My Concubine, Pratibha Parmar's A Place of Rage and Handsworth Songs by the Black Audio Film Collective films that inspired her own aesthetics as a theatre-maker although she's never admitted her equally lowbrow tastes to Sylvester, who's too much of a political purist to understand such as her addictions to Dynasty and Dallas, the original series and their recent incarnations or America's Top Model or Millionaire Matchmaker or Big Brother and the rest ...

Amma looked around the bar at the other alternatives who'd moved into Brixton when it was crime-addled but affordable these people were her people, they'd lived through two riots and were proud of their multiracial social circles and bloodlines, like Sylvester, who'd gone on a pilgrimage here to visit the gay community centre that came and went and met the man who became his life partner, Curwen, newly arrived from St Lucia they used to make such a striking couple Sylvester, or Sylvie, was then blond and pretty, he spent most of the eighties wearing dresses, his long hair flowing down his back he was out to challenge society's gender expectations, long before the current trend, he's taken to complaining, I was there first Curwen, freckled and light brown, might wear a turban, kilt, lederhosen and full make-up when he felt like it to challenge various other expectations he said Sylvester's now grey, balding, bearded, and is never seen in anything other than a threadbare Chinese worker's suit which he claims is an original from eBay whereas Curwen wears a retro donkey jacket and denim dungarees two young men sat at the table next to them, awkward and incongruous with their office haircuts, smooth cheeks, crisp suits, polished shoes Amma and Sylvester exchanged looks, they hated the interlopers who were colonizing the neighbourhood, who patronized the chi-chi eateries and bars that now replaced a stretch of the indoor market previously known for stalls selling parrot fish, yam, ackee, Scotch bonnet peppers, African materials, weaves, Dutch pots, giant Nigerian land snails and pickled green eggs from China these upmarket places also employed security guards to keep the locals out because while their clientele loved slumming it in SW2 or SW9 they couldn't hide the fact that SW1 and SW3 were in their DNA Sylvester was very active in the Keep Brixton Real Campaign he'd lost none of his revolutionary zeal which wasn't necessarily a good thing

Amma sipped her seventh coffee of the day, this one laced with Drambuie, while Sylvester slugged beer from a bottle, the only way a revolutionary should drink it, according to him he still ran his socialist theatre company, The 97%, which toured to fringe venues and 'hard-to-reach communities', which she should also still be doing Amma, you should be taking your plays to community centres and libraries, not to the middle-class bastards at the National she replied that the last time she took a show to a library, the audience was mainly made up of homeless people who were sleeping at best, snoring at worst it was about fifteen years ago, she vowed never to again social inclusion is more important than success, or should it be called sick-cess? Sylvester replied, and Amma couldn't convince him she was right to move on to bigger things as he kept knocking back the beers she paid for (well, you must be earning a lot now you've hit the big time) she argued it was her right to be directing at the National and it was the theatre's job to make sure they attracted audiences beyond the middle-class day-trippers from the Home Counties, reminding him this included his parents, a retired banker and homemaker from Berkshire, who came to London for its culture, parents who supported him, even when he came out as a teenager he'd once let slip while drunk that he got a monthly allowance (she was far too nice to ever remind him of this) the thing is, she said, while troublemaking on the periphery's all well and good, we also have to make a difference inside the mainstream, we all pay taxes that fund these theatres, right? Sylvester offered up the smug expression of a tax-dodging outlaw at least I do now, she said, and you should he sat back, his eyes watery from the beers, silently judging her, she knew that look, the drink was about to bring out a viciousness otherwise absent from her good friend admit it, Ams, you've dropped your principles for ambition and you're now establishment with a capital E, he said, you're a turncoat she stood up, gathered up her African print patchwork bag and left the premises

a little further down the high street she looked back and saw him leaning against the wall of the Ritzy rolling up a cigarette still rolling up you stay there, Sylvie.