Gobi was straining to get down, her tail shaking wildly. “I don’t think this is going to work,” I said. “You have such a lovely place. If we stay here, it’ll end in tears.”
The man smiled back. “I think you’re probably right.”
Only two months had passed since I first met Gobi, and even though we had been together for only a few days of the race and the week in Urumqi, the bond between us was strong. Now that we had been reunited for the second time, she seemed determined not to let me out of her sight.
The flat we looked at next was everything the previous house was not: it was small, was a little bit shabby, and contained almost no furniture. It was perfect.
I particularly liked the fact that it was up on the eleventh floor. Even though I didn’t know how Gobi escaped from Nurali’s home, or whether she had been taken, I didn’t want to take any chances. After all, it had only taken a few seconds for Gobi to burst through the dog barrier that kept the Labradors out. If she did manage to find a way out of the flat door, surely she wouldn’t be able to hack the lift.
Kiki’s guys took us to the local Walmart equivalent—WuMart—and we returned to the flat with all the essentials for the next four months: bed linens, a toaster, a frying pan, and a monster bag of dog food.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the moment I said goodbye to our helpers and closed the door behind them. I took a moment to look at Gobi, who stared, as she always did at times such as this, right back at me.
“This is it,” I said. “Just you and me.” I was excited but pretty daunted as well. I knew enough about China to know that I was helpless. I couldn’t speak more than four words, and I couldn’t read a single character.
If it was possible, Gobi’s stare grew even deeper. She tilted her head to one side, trotted back into the flat, jumped up on the couch, curled herself into a ball, gave two heavy sighs, and closed her eyes.
“Fair enough,” I said, sitting down beside her. “If you’re not stressed, I guess I won’t be either.”
During the coming days, I got to know Gobi a whole lot better. I knew from the race and our time in Urumqi that she liked to sleep up against me, using me as her pillow, but in Beijing she took being affectionate and tactile to a whole new level.
As soon as I stepped out of the shower the following morning, she was licking my feet and shins as if they were covered in bacon. I just laughed and let her have at it. It was quite a change from the way I’d tried to avoid touching her when I first saw her in the desert. And even though I still didn’t have any medical evidence that proved she didn’t have rabies, she had charmed her way to my heart. I couldn’t resist.
When the rest of me was dry, we went out to explore the local area. I’d seen a few shops at the bottom of the block of flats and a large shopping centre half a mile away. It was a beautiful summer’s day with no pollution that I could see, and I fancied a stroll along the nearby canal and a decent cup of coffee.
The walk was easy enough. The coffee, however, was impossible.
I went into the first Starbucks I saw and waited my time in the queue.
I shuffled up to the counter and was just about to give my order when the server looked at Gobi in my arm and pointed to the door.
“No dogs!”
“Oh, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ll just get a takeaway.”
“No. Take dog outside.” She waved her hands at me as if trying to flick off something unpleasant from her wrists.
I left the store and continued walking. No way was I going to tie Gobi up and leave her outside.
We got pretty much the same reaction at the next coffee place as well as the one after it, where we stopped and sat on the seats out front. I was giving Gobi some water from my hand, just as I did during the race, when a guy came out and told us to leave.
“It’s only water!” I said, a bit annoyed by now.
“No!” he shouted. “Must not do. You go.”
We walked home more than a little dejected. In a small way I felt that I knew what it was like for Gobi and the countless other stray dogs in China. Being treated like an outcast was no fun at all. Being judged and rejected like that was painful.
If Gobi was bothered by it, she didn’t let on. In fact, she seemed happier than ever. She held her head high, and her eyes shone bright as we walked. In many ways it was impossible to tell that she’d been a stray dog on the city streets a couple of weeks earlier, and the deep scar on the top of her head was slowly healing. But the way she carefully held her right hind leg up, avoiding putting weight on it, made it perfectly clear that we needed to fast-track her operation.
Before that, however, I had another task to deal with. One that was even more urgent. I needed to register ownership of Gobi under my name. Chinese law states that every dog owner must carry his licence whenever out in public with his dog. I’d heard that if I was caught without one, Gobi could be taken away that instant.
Kiki helped with the paperwork, and once it was done and I slipped the dog licence into my wallet, I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. Not only was I now legal, but I also had another line of defense against someone else trying to claim ownership of Gobi.
The more time I spent with Gobi, the more I learned about her. The more I learned about her, the more intrigued and amazed by her I became.
Every time we walked past a piece of rubbish on the pavement, she’d pull at the lead and drag me over to let her scavenge for food. It told me that her street days in Urumqi probably weren’t her only experience of having to fend for herself, and I’d often watch her devour the leftover remnants inside a takeaway wrapper and wonder just how many secrets her life held.
In spite of being a connoisseur of street food, she had already shown me in Urumqi that she could adapt easily to a more sophisticated style of life. I guess not every dog is suited to flat living, but Gobi settled into it with ease. In many ways she never seemed happier than when she was curled up beside me, staring deep into my eyes as we hung out on the couch. She didn’t bark when I was with her, she didn’t attack what little furniture we had, and on the few occasions when she didn’t manage to hold on until we’d got outside to do her business, I could see she felt guilty about it.
The first time Gobi had an accident was soon after we moved in. I’d decided to get my coffee fix in the flat that morning, and I didn’t quite read her signs correctly. I thought Gobi was spinning around and sniffing the door because she’d heard a dog barking in a nearby flat.
It was only when she disappeared into the bathroom for a minute and re-emerged, head down, walking sideways up to me, that I knew something was wrong. With her ears pinned down and head hung low, she wore a look of complete shame.