I backed off, figuring that saying no was only going to make her more determined. I stopped talking about it and assumed that by the time Christmas was over, she’d have forgotten all about it.
I was wrong. After Christmas, Lucja was more determined than ever, and with the race only ten months away, she felt she had to move fast. She contacted the race rep, downloaded the application form, and told me she was ready to do it.
It was my last chance to stop her, and I threw the very best reason I could think of at her.
“How are you going to go without having a shower? What about your hair? Your nails?”
“I don’t care about that. I’m not bothered. The Orange River runs through one of the stages, and I can wash my hair that day.”
I tried a different line of attack: “Johannesburg’s got one of the highest murder rates of any city in the world. Do you really want to fly in and out of a city like that?”
“Dion, I’m doing it. Are you going to come with me?”
I thought for a while.
“We’ve got to work off all our Christmas fat.”
She just stared.
It was New Zealand all over again. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop her, and I didn’t want to. I’d always loved Lucja’s courage and her enthusiasm, and I knew my life had been so much better since I met her. I wanted to make sure she was going to be okay out there, too, even if it meant doing something as ridiculous as running across the Kalahari Desert.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”
I hadn’t spoken to Lucja since the night I stayed in Urumqi. Some runners had paid fifty pounds to be able to send e-mails and post blogs during the race, but not me. I didn’t want to be distracted, and I knew Lucja would be able to check the race organizer’s website for daily updates on my times and race position. So it was in Hami, after the awards dinner, that I finally got to phone her after more than a week apart.
I was actually a little nervous. I had to find a way to tell her I wanted to bring a stray Chinese dog back to live with us. We hadn’t had a dog since Curtly the Saint Bernard. Both of us had taken his death badly; we had an unspoken agreement that neither of us really wanted to go through that kind of pain again.
As I prepared to dial, I ran through my speech one more time. “Isn’t it great that I finished second? And something weird happened too. A little dog followed me, and I’m beginning to wonder about maybe bringing her home to live with us.”
If Lucja was on my side, I knew it would happen. If she wasn’t, bringing Gobi home would be a lot harder than I thought.
The phone rang, and I took a deep breath.
Even before I could say much more than hello, Lucja started talking.
“How’s Gobi?”
I was stunned. “You know about Gobi?”
“Yeah! A lot of the other runners have mentioned her in their blogs, and she’s even made it into a few official race updates. She’s a pretty little thing, too, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is. I wanted to talk to you about something—”
“You’re bringing her home? As soon as I heard about her, I knew you’d want to.”
Having been away from cities and civilization for a week, the transfer from the Urumqi train station to the airport left my head spinning. I had forgotten how crowded the city was and how impossible it was to make myself understood. Even something as simple as checking in for my three-leg flight back home took three times as long as it should have. Everywhere I went there were crowds of people, and every official stared at me with thinly veiled suspicion.
I remembered why I’d vowed never to return to China.
Had meeting Gobi changed how I felt? Perhaps. The run had matched my previous best—second place in the 2014 Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon—and it had brought Gobi into my life. But I still found it hard to imagine myself coming back. Without knowing any of the language, it was just too hard to get things done.
I was approaching the gate for my flight back to Beijing when I saw all the race organizers waiting to board.
I knew the boss had taken an interest in Gobi, and I wanted to make sure she didn’t forget once she got back from the race. I thanked her for getting Nurali to look after Gobi while I went back home to make the arrangements.
She handed me her business card. “It’s been fantastic to see the story of you and Gobi take shape. If we can help make it happen, we will.”
It was only when I got on the plane that I wondered why I hadn’t asked the boss about why Nurali hadn’t shown up at the awards dinner in Hami. I guessed I didn’t want to appear pushy or like I was going to be an awkward person to deal with. But as the plane taxied and I drifted off, I wondered whether maybe there was something more to it than that. I was trusting Nurali to take good care of Gobi, but did I know her that well? Why hadn’t she come to Hami? Was it really just an error of communication, or was it a sign that things might not go so smoothly after all?
Don’t be paranoid, I told myself. Sleep on it. These things always look better in the morning.
11
Lucja met me at the Edinburgh airport with some bad news. While I’d been flying, she’d looked into the process of bringing a dog into the UK.
“It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “You’d have thought the hardest part of the whole thing would be getting Gobi out of China, but from what I can tell it’s getting her into Britain that’s going to be tough. There’s more red tape than you can imagine.”
In between missing Gobi and looking forward to seeing Lucja again, I’d done a fair bit of imagining. I’d imagined Gobi held in quarantine, our having to pay astronomical vet bills, and the whole thing’s taking months on end.
It turned out I was pretty much correct.
She’d need to spend four months in quarantine, and that wasn’t going to be cheap. But the really bad news was where she would have to serve her time.
“Heathrow,” said Lucja. “That’s the only option.”
By Chinese or American standards, the four hundred miles that separate our home in Edinburgh from London’s main airport isn’t all that much. But in the UK, it’s an epic journey that costs hundreds of pounds in petrol or flights, plus even more for hotels and taxis. Life in London isn’t cheap, even for dogs.
The more we looked into it, the more we discovered that Lucja had been right about the costs and complexities of bringing a dog to the UK, but we’d underestimated how hard it would be to get Gobi out. In a battle for which country could wrap up the problem in the most amount of red tape, it looked like China was going to win.