I think it’s safe to say that my father was probably always an abomination of nature. He managed to hide it for long enough to woo my mum, a normally discerning and intelligent woman. If the eventual outcome hadn’t been so tragic, and if one of the people involved hadn’t been an absolute imbecile, and if there hadn’t been a dearth of actual romance, their meeting would have made for good romantic fiction.
The ill-starred chance of their meeting was thus: it was twelve months before I was born. They were introduced in an Italian coffee shop in Soho one evening in 1959, after her dance rehearsal. Though English by birth, she was inexorably drawn to the romantic and was an amateur flamenco dancer. She had danced her way across Spain at a time when few women traveled alone. I have an old black-and-white photo of her in her flamenco dress, castanets hoisted high above her head, looking blonde and epic: a roman-nosed Marilyn Monroe meets Carmen Amaya. He was her dance partner’s flatmate and fresh off the kebab boat. He looked like a Greek Cypriot Elvis, all Brylcreemed quiff and tight calf muscles. Over the mist of a frothy coffee, served in a yellow Pyrex cup and saucer, she fell for his exotic good looks and his raven Presley quiff. And our fate was sealed.
It is fair to say I carried some guilt. It was actually my fault they got married. They were on holiday, going to Cyprus—by boat—to see his family. She was spectacularly seasick. By the time they had docked, she knew two things. One: she didn’t like The Future Fat Murderer AKA George Costa very much, and two: she was carrying his child.
They married in the one-goat village where he grew up. It was a hasty, sad affair of a wedding. He looked like a second-tier spiv; she wore a borrowed wedding gown and held a plastic bouquet. Somewhere in there was portent. I still have the letter she wrote to her parents, telling them of her “good news” from Cyprus, trying in vain to put a positive spin on the fact that she was up the spout and marrying the man of her nightmares. They had kept the letter as their only souvenir of a wedding they hadn’t attended. My mum found it when she cleared their house after they both died. And then it came to me. Along with a half-used bag of Avon cosmetics sadness and a house full of ghouls.
My dad never once spoke of how they met. He never imparted memories. On balance it was probably because he was too stupid to retain them rather than a zen-like ability to live in the moment. It was my mum who used to tell me the story of their tawdry courtship. I would make her repeat the tale over and over, and quietly, inwardly, would shout, “Now! Get out now!” at moments when she could have saved herself. All of us. Me.
As if it wasn’t enough of a blow that he turned out to be a terrible person, my father failed to hold on to his physical attributes. Just like the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, he went dramatically to seed. By the time I was planning on killing him, he was no longer what you’d describe as a looker. He had developed a pot belly and chubby stumpy legs, which he attempted to assuage with ludicrous stack-heeled boots. He was barely holding on to the remnants of the quiff: his crowning glory had diminished to a lavishly lacquered all-round comb-over, which was in a battle to the death against an ever-expanding central bald patch. We both knew the bald patch would win. It was just a matter of time.
The years never took their toll on my mum. My dad took his toll on her, like he did on all of us. The virtues that he was drawn to—her sense of adventure, her dancing, her freedom of spirit—were the things that he found to be a threat once they were married. And, slowly but surely, he pressed all the beautiful creases out of her until she was as flat as the women he had never been attracted to. I vowed that would not happen to me. When she died, I had two choices: to die with her or to live because of her.
After almost a year, I was still almost certain I had made the right choice.
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From Big Nobody by Alex Kadis. Copyright © 2026 by Alex Kadis. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
