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For something to do, I switch on the television and flick to the local news programme. Their headline story tells us that a celebrity, one of many who are famous only for getting their breasts out and sleeping with footballers at every opportunity, has been signing copies of her autobiography at a city centre bookshop. There are lots of pictures of her pouting and preening for the camera. Is this a news story? Is this what matters more in our lives these days? Are people really more interested in that than they are in the plight of a missing man?
Sadly, I guess they are.
Chapter Eighty-One
Minutes turn into hours. Hours turn into days. Days, of course, turn into weeks. I would that it were different, but it isn’t. Time goes on, no respecter of heartache.
A month has gone by now, and there’s still no sign of Dominic. I’m back at work, going through the motions of normal life. What else could I do? Every time my phone rings I’m sick with anticipation, but it’s never him. It’s usually someone worried about me and I want to tell them all to stop phoning, stop torturing me further. The only person I want at the end of the line is my missing loved one.
I put Dominic’s picture on all the UK missing persons websites I could find on the internet. They’re peopled mainly by parents estranged by bitter divorces, one of whom has abducted their own child or children and has spirited them away to hotter or colder climes. The others are more often than not teenagers who seem to have left home after one too many rows and never came back. One lot of children loved too much and another lot perhaps not loved enough.
Every night I scour the web pages, tracing my fingers over the on-screen photograph of Dominic Lemasolai Ole Nangon. At least I had the forethought to scan the picture of Dominic and I under the acacia tree in the Maasai Mara. It’s the only one that I have of him and I had to give the police the original. Uploading the half with just Dominic on it seemed too sad for words.
In all the time he’s been gone from my world I’ve hardly slept, I’ve hardly eaten. When I do eat, it rarely stays down for long. Mrs Duston has kept me in chicken soup, as it’s all I seem able to manage. All my nights are spent curled up on the sofa in Dominic’s blanket. And I still have no idea where he might be.
Absently combing my client’s hair, I lift up my brush with bleach on it.
‘It’s not for me,’ the woman says and, suddenly, I snap back to the present.
‘What?’
‘It’s not for me,’ she repeats, looking at me in the mirror. ‘The bleach.’
That stops me in my tracks.
She nods her head towards Mrs Hitchley, who is sitting in the seat at the next station. ‘That’s your client.’
‘Oh, God,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. So sorry.’
‘No harm done.’ She and Mrs Hitchley exchange a worried glance.
Mrs Hitchley has been coming in to get her roots done every six weeks for the last ten years. How on earth could I mistake her for another client? Sheepishly, I wheel my trolley to the next chair.
‘Are you all right today, Janie?’ my proper client, the one I should be making into a blonde, asks over the top of her magazine.
‘Dominic’s gone missing,’ I tell her. By now everyone knows about Dominic and the minutiae of our relationship. ‘I’m out of my mind with worry.’
She pulls a sympathetic face but I already know what’s coming next. ‘Oh dear. You poor thing.’
‘Yes.’
Then, not a moment later, ‘It’s not unusual, you know.’ A knowing shake of the head, even though I’m still trying to slap bleach on. ‘Happened to a friend of my sister. Had a bloke in the Dominican Republic. Thought she was the only one. Spent all her money visiting him. What she didn’t buy him wasn’t worth having. Found out he had a dozen other women on the go.’
It’s not like that, I want to tell her. You haven’t met Dominic. He’s different. He wouldn’t do that to me. But everyone, it seems, was fully expecting him to do the dirty on me. Everyone except me.
I um and ah my way through the next half hour, barely listening to what Mrs Hitchley has to say, as I put the foil packets on her hair and smooth on the bleach on autopilot. After I set the timer for the bleach, I retreat, gladly, to the staffroom. I feel as if I’m constantly on the verge of hyperventilating and I fall into the nearest seat and breathe deeply.
A moment later, and Kelly comes through to the staffroom. She sits down next to me. Everyone else makes themselves scarce. No one here really knows what to say to me, anyway. Nina and I are barely speaking except to exchange clipped sentences concerning work. She hasn’t apologised to me or broached the matter of Dominic’s disappearance at all. The subject has swallowed up our friendship like a gaping cavern. All the warnings and the gossip about Dominic leaving me, betraying me, have come true and they’re all feeling righteous now. Like a robot, I go through the motions of my job and ignore them all.
