I did. But I wanted to hear her say it anyway.
“Sleep on it. It’ll all look different in the morning.”
For once Lucja was wrong. I didn’t wake up feeling optimistic, and we didn’t have any breakthroughs as we continued the search in the morning. We went through the usual routine of distributing posters, getting into arguments, and dealing with the depressing sight of those mountains in the distance.
There was one difference, however: the search team was now considerably bigger. Along with Lu Xin, Lil, the hairdresser, and the doctor, many others had now joined our team. At one point, later during the search, I counted fifty people, twenty of whom chose to search all through the night while I was sleeping. They were remarkable people, and I could never thank them enough.
Doing the TV interview in the hotel later was a good idea. It reminded me of the surge of interest that we’d had back when the fund-raising kicked off. I’d not done any interviews since Gobi had gone missing, mainly by choice. With no news to share, there didn’t seem to be much point.
The local TV station was different. The reporter wanted to know why a guy from Scotland would come all the way to this city to search for a dog, and he seemed to like the fact that the search was being led by locals.
Whatever the station did with the story, it worked. The next day we had two new volunteers join the search and more than a dozen requests for interviews from Chinese TV stations and newspapers. Just like the Daily Mirror and BBC coverage back home, that first Chinese TV interview had gone viral, unlocking interest from all over the country. One TV station even sent a crew along to follow me for a two-hour live broadcast of the search out on the streets.
Not all the attention was positive. Lu Xin took a call from a woman who claimed she had seen Gobi in a vision and that Gobi was running through snow-capped mountains. I dismissed it out of hand, but I could tell that a few of the searchers were interested.
So I said, “Tell her if she’s any good at having these visions, she needs to have one that has a bit more detail in it. We need to know exactly which one of these mountains Gobi is in.”
I knew nobody was going to get the joke.
The following day the new posters arrived, with the message in both Chinese and whatever version of Arabic the Uighur use. We got the same disinterested reaction from people, but at least the media interest continued to rise.
People started coming up to me on the street wanting to have their photo taken. My lack of Chinese and their lack of English meant we’d hardly ever be able to talk much, but they all seemed to have heard about Gobi and wanted to take a few posters with them. Every time that happened, I reminded myself that if this all worked out right, it was only going to take one poster to do it.
Along with the Chinese media, the international outlets started to get interested again. Lucja had worked the phone hard at home, and after a day’s searching in the streets, I’d get back to the hotel and speak to journalists and producers in the UK and the US. It meant staying up late and not getting much sleep, but it was a whole lot better than sitting around feeling powerless and depressed.
Ever since I arrived in Urumqi, I’d been relying on Lu Xin and her team. We had no offers of help from the authorities or other organizations. We were on our own—that much was clear.
Over the years a lot of people have told me that—given the way my childhood turned sour—they are surprised I’m not messed up. I tell them my childhood contained some hardship, but it also gave me the tools I needed to survive. All that pain and loss gave me a certain kind of toughness, and running gave me the chance to put it to good use. Pain, doubt, fear. I discovered that I’m good at blocking them all out when I’m running. It’s as though I have a switch I can flip on or off at will.
I use that blocking ability at work too. I don’t give up when it looks like all is lost, and I won’t take no for an answer. That mental toughness I learned as a kid has helped me in many ways. I’m grateful for it. But losing Gobi was a shock. It taught me that I’m not as tough as I think.
After everything she had done to stick with me, I couldn’t just forget about her. I couldn’t flip the switch and move on. I couldn’t stop myself from fearing the worst, from doubting our chances, or from feeling the tremendous pain of knowing that—day by day—I was losing her.
16
Day four in Urumqi was almost identical to all the others. I was up at six o’clock, eating dumplings with the rest of the search team in a café in a converted shipping container. We were talking about how long Gobi had been missing: officially it had been ten days, but none of the volunteers believed that. They all thought she’d been missing for at least twice that.
A new girl joined us, Malan—bringing our number that morning up to ten. Malan told me that she had seen me on TV the night before and was so moved by the story that she contacted Lu Xin and asked if she could come along and help. She proved her worth right from the start, suggesting we distribute the Uighur-language version of the poster in a nearby Uighur neighbourhood.
The homes were all single storey, a patchwork of loose bricks and rusted metal roofs. Every other street we’d been down had been wide and clean and lined with cars parked on the side. This Uighur neighbourhood had narrow, twisting alleys, few cars, and a lot of goats caged up in spaces not much bigger than a hotel bathroom.
I wondered if this was the first time in the Uighur part of town for the Han Chinese members of the search party. If it was, they didn’t show it. They just got on with the job of putting posters into as many hands as was physically possible.
The only difference in the day came in the afternoon when Lu Xin left me at the hotel to do another interview while she drove to the airport to pick up Richard, my tent mate from the Gobi race. He lived in Hong Kong, and his work took him all over China. He and I had kept in touch since the race, and he’d been a generous supporter of the Bring Gobi Home fund-raising. When he found out that he was going to be a short flight away from me in Urumqi, he offered to come and help with the search for a few days.
I was excited about having a friend come and join me, and the fact that Richard was fluent in Mandarin was another bonus. I was also looking forward to being able to run. Ever since arriving in Urumqi, I’d ambled around the streets at the same tortoise-slow pace as the rest of the search team. I’d tried getting them to pick it up a bit, but it was no use.