February 3 Three more guys make a leap for the boxcar and scramble aboard as it begins to get very crowded and very hot in the rusting tin can. There is only around three square metres of floor space left so the stowaways have to pick their way through the bundles, bags, sacks and crates of fruit to find a comfortable place to sit.
The guard shouts a warning which sends everyone scurrying over the mangoes and avocados in fear of being detected by the Chef de Gare. I am left alone at the sliding door and feel terribly exposed. I decide to follow my fellow boxcar companions and dive for cover behind the crates holding up the bike on the far side of the carriage. There are loud stage whispers, evidently talking about me and my dramatic leap over the mangoes, and then suppressed laughter, the kind you hear in church. The guard beckons me back to the open sliding door as the Chef de Gare takes a cursory look into the carriage - he idly acknowledges me and the guard - everything OK here - and moves on down the track. The stowaways are still acting like naughty kids in church and clearly appreciate my solidarity with them in my leap for cover. What they don't know is that I don't have a train ticket either but Le Blanc is not suspected or even questioned.
We're all relived when the train jolts to a start and moves away from Dolisie towards Pointe Noire with some stragglers running after the boxcar down the track.
I am instantly hungry but there is no way I can eat my meagre rations (chocolate chip cookie anyone?) without incurring the wrath of my fellow stowaways. I take out the packet and hand the biscuits round. They're an instant hit and they all decide I should eat some of their food. It is the start of a feast I wouldn't have thought the Congo was capable of.
They buy everything from women and small children who run to the train when it arrives in their village. We feast on grilled fish, boiled eggs, manioc wrapped in its own leaves, we suck ice lollies frozen in plastic bags, chew on corn on the cob, lick and suck a strange sour cooked fruit stuck on the end of a stick and eaten like an ice cream mivvi, eat more unidentifiable fruits with the taste of pineapples, lychees and guava, and to crown it all off we gorge ourselves on the ripening and now warm mangoes and tomatoes that surround us in the boxcar. As I finish one huge mango with the blissful utterance "fantastique!" the guard throws me two more stolen from a crate from across the carriage which I feast on until my teeth are stringy from the flesh and my lap dripping with the juice. Well, there needs to be some perks of riding the rails as a stowaway.
I'm feeling like a character in a Tom Waits song and look forward to Pointe Noire with renewed enthusiasm.
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