Alexander Technique sessions to counteract what he calls academic hunchback syndrome
every so often he casually glances around to see who’s recognized him off the telly
Dad’s budget in clothes could pay her university fees for a year, the very fees he says he can’t afford
it’s his thing, prioritizing fashion over the self-sacrifice of proper fatherhood
hers is rummaging through his stuff in search of the large denomination banknotes he leaves in his jacket pockets in his walk-in wardrobe in the (four-storey) house on Clapham Common with its white wooden flooring, yellow walls and the original Cartier-Bresson photographs he chanced upon in a car boot sale in Wembley when he was a teenager and bought for a pound each
as he boasts to all first-time visitors when they walk past them in the entrance hallway
it’s also probably fair to say she was probably too young at thirteen to innocently open the drawer under his bed and come across a leather gas mask type thing with a leather dick attached where she presumed a nose should be, along with associated whips, gels, handcuffs and other unexplainable objects
unfortunately, once seen, never unseen and it was a lesson for her at a young age that you never know people until you’ve been through their drawers
and computer history
Dad
the author of the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling trilogy: How We Lived Then (2000), How We Live Now (2008), and How We Will Live in the Future (2014)
Dr Roland Quartey, the country’s first Professor of Modern Life at the University of London
really? all of it, Dad? she asked him when he told her proudly on the phone about his latest professorial number
isn’t that, like, a bit of a tall order? don’t you have to be an expert on everything in a world that encompasses over seven billion people and like about two hundred countries and thousands of languages and cultures
isn’t that more like God’s purview? tell me, are you God now, Dad? I mean officially?
he mumbled stuff about the Internet of Things and Pokémon, terrorism and global politics, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and then threw in quotes he attributed to Derrida and Heidegger for good measure, which he always does when he can’t handle a tricky situation
what about bell hooks? she shot back, quickly scrolling down the reading list for her ‘Gender, Race and Class’ module on her phone
what about Kwame Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Aimé Césaire, Angela Davis, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Gloria Steinem, V. Y. Mudimbe, Cornel West and the rest?
Dad didn’t reply
he wasn’t expecting this, the student outwitting the master (grasshopper rocks!)
I mean, how on earth can you be a Professor of Modern Life when your terms of reference are all male, and actually all-white (even when you’re not, she refrained from adding)
when he eventually spoke, his voice was choked, his car had arrived (not cab), he had to dash off
if true, the car (car = limo and cab = taxi) would be to chauffeur him to a television studio because he regularly pops up on the telly to have arguments with people even more arrogant than himself he’s become a media-whore, Mum opines disapprovingly, he was such a great guy before he became famous and was corrupted by celebrity, he used to believe in something, now he only believes in himself, your father is very establishment, Yazz, that’s why they lionize him, he’s not an outsider like me, trying to get a foot in the door and being given crumbs, Yazz, crumbs
funnily enough, when Mum watches him on the telly, she begrudgingly agrees with pretty much everything he says, and she can’t say she’s an outsider now she’s on at the National
Dad did an epic sulk after Yazz’s epic take-down
he couldn’t have her to stay for that weekend or the next or the next
deadlines-deadlines-deadlines, you know how it is?
the thing is, if she and her father are going to have a healthy relationship into the future, it’s up to her to keep him in check because no one else is going to do it, he surrounds himself with what Mum calls his ‘court sycophants’, the people Yazz meets at his parties, mainly famous white people off the telly who see him as an honorary one of them
she’s almost got there with Mum, although it was a hard slog, especially when she was fourteen or fifteen and Mum was prone to hysteria when she didn’t get her own way
now she knows better than to try to control or contradict her daughter
all Yazz needs to say these days is, don’t sass me, Mumsy! and she shuts up
Dad’s on that learning curve too
he’ll thank her in the end
Kenny (Godfather Number Two, who wisely gives her birthday cheques starring two zeros) is sitting loyally next to Dad
Kenny’s also bald and mustachioed in a 1970s way (not good), he’s a landscape gardener and she and him get along mainly because he has no delusions about his own greatness, they’ll watch X Factor together just for the sake of it, whereas Dad will pretend it’s because he’s going to write about its cultural significance
they go out riding their bikes very early on a Sunday morning before the city wakes up, across the common to Battersea, down the backstreets to Richmond and the river, for the pure enjoyment of it, not because it’s enforced exercise to stay slim
which is the only reason Dad runs marathons
Kenny did ask her to be a bit less negative towards Dad the other day after he’d gone upstairs in a huff over a harmless comment she’d made
Yazz replied she was going through her cynical late teenage years, I just can’t help it, Kenny, once I come out all lovable again on the other side, I’ll let you know
Kenny cracked up at that, he likes to remind her he’s known her since she was a sperm among millions in Dad’s test tube and when Mum used to complain she was giving her a good kicking inside her womb
to which she quipped back that it was because she had an embryonic premonition she was going to be born into poverty
once she’s graduated and working, she’s going to persuade Mum to sell her house, correction, their house, which is now worth a fortune thanks to Mum’s gentrification of Brixton
Mum can downsize to a bungalow, which will be very practical for a woman her age, probably in one of the unfashionable seaside towns where they’ll be cheaper
with the money left over from the sale of the house, Yazz can buy a small flat
a one-bedroom will do for now
helping me on to the property ladder will be the defining act of your life, Mumsy
she didn’t reply
Yazz wishes the play had already opened to five-star universal acclaim so that she can watch it stamped with pre-approval, it matters because she’ll have to deal with the aftermath if it’s slagged off by the critics and Mum’ll go on an emotional rampage that might last weeks – about the critics sabotaging her career with their complete lack of insight into black women’s lives and how this had been her big break after over forty years of hard graft blah di blah and how they didn’t get the play because it’s not about aid workers in Africa or troubled teenaged boys or drug dealers or African warlords or African-American blues singers or white people rescuing black slaves
guess who’ll have to be on the end of the phone to pick up the pieces?
she’s