46.

We rode for six hours straight. It was tough: my shoulders seized up with the effort of hauling the bike left and right, and the rattling, bucking bike frame, shot through with vibrations, made my feet, hands and bum so numb I could barely feel them. The burden of my pack didn’t make it any easier to keep the bike upright. And the ancient helmet was heavier than I’m used to as well. My head felt like it was about to come off. We kept having to slow down to cross tiny streams, either through the water itself or across crude bridges made of little more than branches. I got wet. Ahead of me, I could see Amelia struggling to stay balanced on the back of Marcel’s bike. Every now and then she’d tense up rigid, the tendons standing out in her neck, and on more than one occasion I saw her bump helmets with Marcel. But she didn’t call a halt, and Marcel didn’t either obviously. So neither did I. I battled on, though before long every part of me seemed to be screaming, ‘I need a rest!’

Just as I was about to give in and admit I had to stop, we rounded a bend in the track and came upon a sizeable river. It was one of the thousands of tributaries to the mighty Congo, about a football pitch wide and the colour of milky tea. The water seemed so still that to begin with I couldn’t tell which way it was flowing. Though we’d barely seen anyone as we’d fought our way to this point, there was a man waiting next to the river. He was skeletally thin and leaning on an old bicycle hung with big, heavy-looking plastic containers. Amelia immediately jumped down and started talking to him with Marcel. Apparently he was transporting palm oil. His bike, I noticed, had no pedals: he was using it as a means of lugging his wares. It struck me that if it had taken us all those hours to motorbike here, he must have been pushing his incredibly heavy load down that miserable track for days. Immediately I felt less sorry for myself.

‘He’s waiting for the ferry,’ Amelia explained. ‘Apparently there’s one due today.’

‘Just “today”?’

‘That’s what he says.’

‘What do we do until it gets here?’ I asked.

It was a stupid question and it got the answer it deserved from Marcel. ‘Nous attendons,’ he said, adding the translation himself: ‘We wait.’

A cloud of mosquitoes had already gathered, whining around us, but since we were here on account of me I couldn’t complain, and as it was we didn’t have long to wait. Marcel had just broken out some water for us to drink, and we were passing it round, when the ‘ferry’ drifted into view. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but not this. The boat was a hollowed out tree trunk. In the distance it looked like the black husk of a seed pod. Up close it was actually pretty big.

‘What do you call that?’ I said to myself as much as anyone.

‘The French name is pirogue, but you can call it a dugout canoe,’ Amelia replied.

‘Right.’

‘Think about it: no seams. It’s all one piece. Properly watertight. This design hasn’t changed for hundreds of years.’

Two men were piloting the ferry, one at the front and one at the back. They swung it into the bank gently and three women climbed out. All of them were carrying plastic drums that looked as heavy as the cycle-pusher’s. One also had a package on her head, wrapped in yellow leaves and tied up with actual vines. She smiled at me as she passed us, and the kindness in her eyes was so like Mum’s I had to look away. Where was my mum now? Was this attempt to track her and Dad down a fool’s errand? I couldn’t allow myself to think that. But here we were, in the middle of nowhere. The landscape around me stretched infinitely in that moment. I fought back a sudden, stabbing hopelessness by manhandling my motorbike to the edge of the river bank.

The dugout was surprisingly deep: the tree it was cut from must have been massive. Even so, I didn’t expect the ferryman to load both our bikes, our packs and the bicycle laden with palm oil into it in one go. But that’s what he did, and with all of us passengers loaded in as well we sat low in the water, the surface less than a handspan from the gunwales.

I stayed very still in the bottom of that canoe. We all did. If the oarsmen had caught a crab and rocked the boat more than a little one way or the other it would have filled with water and sunk instantly. But having presumably made the trip thousands of times, the pilots moved as gently as the river and we were soon safely on the other side.

Marcel had in mind a village he wanted us to reach before nightfall. I didn’t much fancy sleeping out in the open, so readied myself to set off again quickly. Amelia asked if she could ride with me this time. It felt like a compliment. I had to wear my pack on my front to make room for her, and handling the bike with the two of us on it was doubly hard to start with, but the track was better defined this side of the river and she’d learned to ride pillion well with Marcel. I quickly grew used to the weight of her pressing against my back. We forged on. At dusk Marcel turned on his bike’s headlamp. I did the same. The two beams scissored wildly ahead of us, full of insects. I couldn’t have gone on much longer, but just as the river had saved me earlier in the day, we arrived in the village abruptly. There were no electric lights here. After a quick meal of heavily salted vegetable mush Marcel negotiated us floor space in what seemed little more than a shack. I didn’t care. Curled in my sleeping bag, with Amelia already breathing deeply next to me, I shut my eyes and fell into a weird half-sleep, the muddy track still unspooling ahead of me, the bike’s engine still loud in my ears.