Because of the crowd of people, I couldn’t see much, and the noise was intense too. I couldn’t even tell where this Gobi lookalike was at first, but as I pushed a little deeper into the room, a knot of people at the back stepped aside and a streak of sandy brown shot across the room and jumped up at my knees.
“It’s her!” I shouted, picking her up and thinking for a moment that I’d slipped into a dream. She soon started making that same excited, whimpering, yapping sound she’d made whenever I’d been reunited with her at the end of a day apart on the run. “This is Gobi! It’s her!”
I sat on the couch and took a good look at Gobi. Her head didn’t look like I remembered it. There was a big scar across it, a mark as wide as my finger running from near her right eye back behind her left ear. I knew she didn’t know her name, but whenever we’d been on the run or in the camp, all I had to do was make a little clicking sound, and she’d come straightaway. So I put her down on the ground, took a step to the other side of the room, and clicked.
She was by my side like a shot. It was her all right. There was no doubt in my mind. No doubt at all.
The noise levels in the room exploded. People were shouting and calling out her name, but I wanted to check Gobi over and make sure that she was okay. I found a couch and looked again, running my hands up and down her back and legs to check. She winced when I touched her right hip, obviously in pain. She was okay to stand and could put some weight on it, but between the hip and her scar, I knew she was lucky to be alive. Whatever had happened to her, it had been quite the adventure.
Gobi was burrowing into my lap like a newborn puppy, and the others crowded around for photos. I understood their excitement, and I was so grateful to them for their help, but it was a moment that I really would have enjoyed being alone. Well, just Gobi and me.
The doctor got a little overexcited and wanted a selfie with Gobi. She picked her up and must have touched her hip, because Gobi let out a loud squeal of pain and jumped out of her arms and back into mine. After that, I didn’t let anyone else get too close. Gobi needed some protecting, even from the people who loved her.
It took an hour for the hysteria to calm down and the full story to emerge. Richard translated while Mr Ma, the house owner, explained how he had found her.
He’d been in a restaurant with his son earlier in the evening. His son had been telling him about this girl he’d seen that afternoon—the newest member of the search team, Malan. She had been putting up posters that she’d added handwritten messages pleading with people not to throw away the posters because it was sad that the dog was missing and a man had come all the way from the UK to find her. Mr Ma’s son had thought that was a kind thing for her to do.
As they walked home from their meal, they saw a dog, looking hungry and tired, curled up at the side of the road.
“That’s the same dog, Dad,” he said. “I’m sure of it.” He made his father wait while he ran back a couple of streets to where they’d passed some of the posters.
When they called out to Gobi, she followed them the short walk home, where they then phoned the number on the poster and sent the photo to Lu Xin. When she relayed my message that I didn’t think it was a match, it was Mr Ma’s son who scanned the poster, took a better-quality photo, and made it clear how similar the eyes were. He was convinced even if I wasn’t.
“So what do we do next? We take her back to the hotel, right?”
Richard translated. Then both he and Lu Xin shook their heads.
“They won’t let you. No hotels in the city will ever allow a dog in.”
“Really?” I was shocked. “But after all this? After all she’s been through?”
“They’re right,” said Richard. “Maybe you can try and talk to the manager and see if he’ll let you, but I doubt it. I stay in hotels all over, and I’ve never seen a dog in one.”
It was past eleven o’clock, and I was too tired to argue, either with my friends or with a hotel receptionist.
“We should ask Mr Ma to keep her here tonight,” said Lu Xin. “Then you can buy all the things you need for her, like a lead and collar, food, bowls, and a bed, and then collect her tomorrow.”
Lu Xin had a point. I’d been thinking so long about Gobi being lost that I’d never come up with a plan for what we should do when we finally found her. I was totally ill equipped and felt bad at the thought of saying goodbye to Gobi and heading back to the hotel. But the others were right; it was the only sensible option.
I looked at Gobi, curled up beside me on the couch. She was going through that same twitch and snore routine that she had on the first night she slept beside me in the tent.
“I’m sorry, girl,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to learn about being your dad, haven’t I?”
On our way back to the hotel, I rang Lucja. “We bloody well found her!” I said the moment she picked up. Both of us didn’t say much for a while. We were too busy crying.
PART 5
17
The hotel manager was a strange guy.
I had spent enough time driving around the city to know that the hotel was one of the very best in Urumqi. He’d let us use one of the meeting rooms downstairs to carry out numerous interviews, and the story was all over national TV. So I was convinced that if I asked nicely, he’d do us a favour. I thought he’d bend a couple of rules, if he had to, and let Gobi stay in the hotel. Surely the guy would understand how an opportunity like this would be good for business.
“No,” he said.
His English was better than that of most people I’d met, but I tried repeating the request, a little slower this time.
“Can the dog stay in my room? She’s only little. It’ll be good publicity for you.”
“No,” he said again. He understood perfectly what I was asking. “We don’t ever let dogs stay in the hotel.” He paused a moment, then spoke again, his voice lowered. “But I would be willing to help.”
I did some internal high fives. Even if it cost me a few hundred pounds, I knew it would be worth it to keep Gobi safe.
“Perhaps the dog could stay in one of the rooms that we use for staff training.”
It didn’t sound ideal, but I didn’t have many other options. “Can I see it?”
“Of course,” he said. “This way, please, Mr Leonard.” Instead of taking me deeper into the hotel, he led me out of the revolving front door, past the security guard with the standard-issue bulletproof vest and rifle, across a busy car park, and through a set of doors that didn’t appear to have any locks at all on them and swung in the breeze, like saloon doors from an old-time western.
That wasn’t the worst part. The room itself was a disaster.
It wasn’t so much a training facility as a dumping ground. The place was full of cleaning bottles and broken furniture. The door itself didn’t appear to be closable. The manager saw me looking at it and tried to shoulder it shut as well as he could, but there was still a Gobi-sized gap at the bottom where she could easily crawl out.
“I can’t keep her in here,” I said. “She’d run off.”
“So?” he said, turning away and walking back out into the car park.