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1 Roland is the first to triple mwah Amma when she makes her grande entreé to the after-party of The Last Amazon of Dahomey in the lobby of the theatre a crescendo of chattering voices and clinking prosecco glasses stilled followed by rapturous applause and bravo! Amma, bravo! she looks simply spectacular in a figure-hugging wraparound dress that shows off her toned arms, tiny waist and the mama-do hips that have emerged in the past few years although she's gone and ruined the effect by wearing silver trainers ever the rebellious teenager at heart – or rather au coeur the play was simply wonderful, wun-der-ful, Roland effuses which is all she ever wants to hear which is all he ever wants to hear which is all anyone ever wants to hear a five-star review has already been uploaded online from one usually savage pit-bull of a critic who's been uncharacteristically gushing: astonishing, moving, controversial, original rightly so, the production is indeed deserving of the highest praise and a far cry from the agit-prop rants of Amma's early theatre career

although the mother of his only child, writer and director, and dear, dear friend, could have made her name where it mattered a long time ago, if she'd taken his advice and directed a few multi-culti Shakespeares, Greek tragedies and other classics, instead of writing plays about black women which will never have popular appeal, simply because the majority of the majority sees the majority of Les Négresses as separate to themselves, an embodiment of Otherness Roland decided long ago to align himself with L'Établissement, which is why he's a winner and a household name among the educated classes where it counts Amma, on the other hand, has waited three decades before being allowed in through the front door although she hasn't exactly been hammering on the castle walls for the duration in truth, girlfriend spent much of her early career slinging rocks at it he slides away, leaving Amma to the radico-lesbos who still follow her around like ageing fangirls, surging forwards to congratulate her he is shocked to see one of them in a pair of denim dungarees surely La Dungaree hasn't made a comeback? just as he's cogitating on the relationship between sexuality and sartoriality, he's collared by 'Chairman Mao Sylvester', with whom he is cordial at best they've known each other since Amma introduced them at a party at her palatial King's Cross squat back in the day when they were both young and beautiful and spent their weekends tripping on poppers and ecstasy and wearing nowt but leather hot pants and cowboy boots while dancing away under glitter balls to the pumping disco beats at Heaven before disappearing into the darker recesses of the Cellar Bar to satisfy their incorrigible cravings even with each other although once was enough because Sylvester shouting Take that, Maggie T! at the point of ejaculation was quite off-putting

Roland was one of the lucky hedonists to survive El Diablo which swooped in to kill so many of them so many deaths ruined any sense of nostalgia, sadly, remembering the past also meant remembering the dead grumpy old Sylvester is a survivor, too resentfully admits that the play is Amma's best work yet, it's such a shame she's colluded with them, them, he points an enfuried finger at the Boring Suits, as he calls them, who line the party's perimeter, the representatives of the multinationals who beef up the theatre's finances with sponsorship, who stand apart, smiling awkwardly, desperate to be part of the luvvie fun Sylvester says they sold their lefty student principles, if they ever had them, as soon as they left university and accepted an overpaid starter-salary in a morally objectionable corporate job offering lucrative career prospects and inflated annual bonuses which soon turned them into filthy-rich Tories with a hatred of the social welfare infrastructures they're actively not contributing to through tax avoidance and evasion while hypocritically scorning the underclasses as the scourge of society who sponge off the state when they're the ones who are the biggest scroungers on society with no sense of community responsibility other than a very self-aggrandizing, tax- deductible form of fashionable charity they like to call philanthropism! Roland marvels that Sylvester has managed to make a prolonged stab at capitalistic corporate culture and the Tories within a minute of saying hello it might just be a record now it's his turn The Last Amazon of Dahomey is a tour de force, he says, although I would never use such a cliché, you understand, when talking about it on Channel 4 News and the BBC's Front Row tomorrow, rubbing it in because Sylvester has never acknowledged the superb success Roland has made of his career has probably never read a single one of his books and never told him he's seen him on the telly, when people often tell Roland they saw him on the box just the other day it's wilful avoidance on Sylvester's part

and very undermining the play is indeed ground-breaking, Roland continues, in spite of the fact that Sylvester appears to be more interested in grabbing the free prosecco in elegant flutes being passed around by waiters and knocking them back in one go before coming up for air Amma, Roland says, could have paid homage to the original Amazons who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks, according to mythology, and who the Benin, i.e. Dahomeyan Amazons, were compared to by adventurers of the West who travelled to Africa and wrote about their fearless ferocity over a period of one hundred and fifty years perhaps the play could also have employed even more techno-dramatic devices in its production such as holograms of the original Amazons of Greek myth hovering as peripheralized spectres counterpointing the main drama thereby adding a more classical relevancy to its thesis? and while the myth that the real Amazons cut off their breasts to better fight the Greeks with ye olde bow and arrow cannot be proved, we do know that such women warriors existed in the region, courtesy of recent DNA testing and other forms of bio-archaeological analysis of the nomadic Scythian kurgans (burial mounds to the layman), which have revealed the historical presence of warrior horsewomen who lived in small tribes from the Black Sea all the way to Mongolia, although none had amputated breasts furthermore, according to Herodotus, the Amazons of myth gathered herb intoxicants, threw them on to the camp fire, inhaled the smoke and got high as a kite, so do you see how Amma missed a trick here by not playing around with the source material? nevertheless, as for the wash of images projected on to the stage making it appear to be filled with thousands of dead Benin Amazons stampeding towards the audience brandishing weaponry and uttering war cries it was terrifyingly realistic and without doubt a coup de théâtre Roland pauses, he's done his research pre-performance so he can pontificate about it post-performance before he can round off his disquisition, Sylvester lays a hand on his arm and says, I'm not one of your star-struck students, Roland, and stalks off, empty flute leading the way towards the waiters who, probably on instruction from the head waiter, have started to bypass their little spot

Roland is tempted to shout after Sylvester that he should be bloody grateful that he, Professor Roland Quartey, has even bothered to offer up his insights free of charge because guess what? who's the one being paid $10,000 to deliver an hour-long lecture in American universities, which is probably more than you earn in two years with your outdated 97% tin-pot theatre company that 1% of the general public has heard of so you can keep your social conscience, Comrade, because he, Roland, has something far more powerful up his sleeve and it's called CULTURAL CAPITAL!!!! Roland is, however, far too sophisticated to cause such a scene, he looks around, the volume and vivacity in the room is increasing as the prosecco loosens up everyone's inner theatricals stage right from the kitchen, the canapés make their entrance, held aloft on gilded trays by tasty young men who enter like a buff chorus line he spots Shirley across the room, still attired à la Women's Institute circa 1984 (dear heart) Dominique is here too, he hasn't seen her in ages, still divinely sexy in a dykey-bikey way, even in her fifties, also being swamped by a group of drooling fangirls (plus ça change) Kenny is prowling around the impossibly handsome and probably Nigerian beefsteak security man at the door who seems to be lapping up the attention Roland prefers white flesh, Kenny likes black flesh, it's as simple as that they're quite independent during the week, weekends they visit farmers' markets, catch up with friends, sometimes in the countryside a few times a year they take long weekend breaks to their favourite cities: Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, Vilnius, Budapest, Ljubljana summers are spent in the Gambia or Florida 'discretion not deception' is the motto of their twenty-four-year-old union, otherwise they're both free to do their own thing which they both take advantage of when the urge moves them, so long as they don't bring anyone back to their sanctuary home Roland wanders out on to the promenade overlooking the Thames

the night sky is spangled with as many stars as pollution makes visible in this city the river looks like a pulsating oil slick of viscosity at this late hour the typical medley of buildings opposite are in silhouette he simply adores London and for a long time now, in the increasingly rarefied circles of his existence, the city loves him back as for the scorn currently poured on the so-called 'metropolitan elite', he's worked bloody hard to reach the pinnacle of his profession, and it's infuriating that the term is now bandied around by a proliferation of politicians and right-wing demagogues as one of society's evils, who ridiculously accuse 48% of British voters who voted to stay in the EU of being just that while the Brexiteers are preposterously described as ordinary and hardworking, as if everybody else isn't Roland was very willing to defend himself in an EU debate on the BBC with a Brexit campaigner who accused him of being 'a metropolitan elite tosser' to which Roland riposted that his family didn't last six months in the great English countryside when they first arrived from the Gambia before they were hounded out of the village by the rabid racists of the sixties in other words, he said to his accuser, there's a reason why black people (Roland usually avoids the descriptor 'black' in public as much as possible – so crude) ended up in the metropoles, it's because you didn't want us anywhere near your verdant fields and rosy-cheeked damsels nor is he ashamed to be elite, Roland added, why should he, Professor Roland Quartey, the state-educated son of African working-class immigrants, be denied the right to rise up the ranks? or are you saying that black people should only work on the assembly line, clean toilets or sweep up the streets? the audience clapped and cheered before his speechless interlocutor could think quickly enough to counter- punch, the Chair called time on the debate Roland had been given the last word, he should have felt triumphant except he was pissed off that he'd had to engage with race and was, in the aftermath of a debate that went viral (of course that one did), seen as a spokesman for cultural diversity which he resolutely is not

an arm slides gently around his waist from the side, it's Yazz announcing herself in the nicest way possible, which is lovely, because he never knows whether she's going to hug him or berate him Dad, she says, snuggling up, a bit tipsy, he suspects, in spite of her proclamations of being practically teetotal hello darling, he replies, kissing her forehead I was so worried the play was going to be awful and humiliating for Mum, you never know with her, we've been there before, right? she done good, didn't she, Dad? she did, are we proud of her? yeh, dead proud did you tell her this, you know you have to several times, while staring deep into her eyes so she knew I meant it, she's very needy deep down, although you and I know this success will go to her head and she'll become impossible to handle, Dad, impossible he squeezes her ever closer to him he loves it when she lets him hug her feeling her warmth softening into him Yazz is the reason he got his act together, his life is divided into the Before Yazz and After Yazz eras before Yazz, he was an unexceptional university lecturer who'd gone to a rough Ipswich comprehensive, spent his teenage years working hard enough at school to escape his home town of Portsmouth and in his downtime drooled over his idols the dinky and adorable Marc Bolan, the surreally space age David Bowie, and the delectably pretty lead singer of Sweet, Brian Connolly in that order of preference when he made it to university in London he joined the Gay Society on the very first day and made up for lost time in gay clubs still managing to graduate with a first class degree he got his first lectureship after eighteen months' searching, and once there found he simply couldn't sacrifice his hard-won social life in order to devote the thousands of hours it took to sit down alone and write the damned books that would turn him from an anonymous academic into someone who was respected as a public figure

with Yazz en route he took stock, decided he needed to be a greater person for the child he'd consciously decided to bring into the world with his friend Amma, who was perfect for the job of mothering their child in that she was intelligent, creative and fun he was deeply moved when she accepted him as her sperm donor after his trip to Le Wank Bank, Amma quickly fell pregnant, by the time Yazz was born he'd begun writing his first book, intending it to be intellectual without being overly academic, popular without being populist, he wrote about what interested him – philosophy, architecture, music, sport, film, politics, the internet, the shaping of societies: past, present, futuristic his first book made his reputation, by the third, it was sealed however, unlike Amma, his career has never been predicated on his perceived identities, as expected of black intellectuals (even the term 'black intellectual' gnaws) he bemoans the fact that black people in Britain are still defined by their colour in the absence of other workable options nor can he authentically call himself Gambian when he left when he was two in any case, neither his blackness nor his gayness are the result of conscious political decisions, the former is genetically determined, the latter psychically and psychologically pre-disposed where they will remain, not as intellectual or activist preoccupations but rather as footnotes the university gig keeps him financially afloat in between book advances, he doesn't mind giving the odd lecture to mature students, won't teach classes any more, and as he's famous and on the telly, they can't make him so what if the students are disappointed, he didn't create the system (he just works it baby!), has a rule not to reply to emails unless they come directly from his bosses, whereupon he replies immediately and with great cordiality this works very well because everyone else in his department has given up asking him to do anything he knows he's loathed by his 'colleagues' who practically snarl at him when he walks down the Corridor of Long Knives what does he care? he's rarely there

when Roland started writing the first of his three-part magnum opus he'd already decided he wasn't going to be accepted by L'Établissement, he was going to become it his bredren and sistren could damned well speak up for themselves why should he carry the burden of representation when it will only hold him back? white people are only required to represent themselves, not an entire race Yazz stirs herself from their reassuring hug, he loves her more than anyone, even more than Kenny the moment she was put into his arms after birth he was smitten, it's been the same ever since, he can't control his love for her, even though she can be such a handful at times, spiteful, when she feels like it he worries about her going forth into a world that will punish her if she doesn't play the game to win by the rules she needs to become proficient in the discourse of diplomacy, but she's so contrary takes after her mother in that regard this part of London is so special at night, isn't it, Dad? she says rather dreamily, isn't St Paul's so, like, majestic? absolutely, it is majestic, darling, I think of it as the architectural heartbeat of the capital, dominating the skyline for hundreds of years until the city's skyscrapers challenged its powerful symbol of religious supremacy with economic prosperity although, and this is a little-known fact, Le Skyscraper was actually indebted to various high-rise precedents such as the eleventh-century high- rises of Egypt, the Renaissance tower houses of Florence and Bologna, the five-hundred-year-old mud-brick constructions of Shibam in Yemen you see, Yazz, the concept wasn't new at all, it was the ancient municipal solution applied to the mid-century population expansion that resulted in dense urbanization before he's finished, Yazz is pulling away, just when they're getting into a great conversation she's heading towards a tattooed man (or is it a woman?) standing alone, smoking, looking out at the river

good to see you, Dad, she says distractedly over her shoulder, I've just seen someone I know I'll be over to visit you and Kenny soon, promise Yazz has no idea of the hollow he feels where she's been so lovingly nestled at his side, the way she did as a small girl who was devoted to him, never wanted to let go, even when she had to go to bed or go home, holding on to him, forcing him to prise her bony little arms off him a small child who loved him just as he was unconditionally most people think he's remarkable so why doesn't she, his beloved only child? all she has to say, and really, just once shouldn't be too difficult you done good, Dad.