‘Um, I don’t know.’

‘Well you’ll have to find out pretty quick.’ He pulls up at the airport terminal. ‘Say hello to the polar bears for me. Is it all ice or is there land under there somewhere?’

I tell him there are no polar bears and it’s not just ice. And there are no Eskimos. I tip him well. He tells me to make sure I stop if I see someone pulled up on the side of the road. I tell him I don’t think there are any roads down in Antarctica. He says oh.

My mother’s with me on the plane to Hobart. She’s flying down from Sydney to see me off at the dock. She wants to know, relentlessly and annoyingly, details about Pat Pisano. Is he married yet? How many children does he have? Did his mother remarry? Did his father? Are they still in the same street? I answer shortly and swiftly. I tell her he stuck his finger up my bum. She’s intrigued. She says she’s never had anything up her bottom in her life. I remind her about the suppositories for her migraines. She says oh yes, those.

In careful paper she gives me a gift of ginger tablets and a box of ginger tea.

‘It’s good for seasickness, darling. Try it.’

I smile. No-one but my mum would give me such a farewell present.

Mid-December, five years earlier. The QEII on an Atlantic crossing, Southampton to New York. A six-day voyage. I vomit twenty-one times. The situation feels unendurable, yet it has to be endured. There’s no way out of it, no way to remove myself from the bellowing roll of the ship because even if I was magnificently wealthy, a hired helicopter would never reach that far. On day five I hold my forehead tightly and go down the stairs to the surgery to join the queue to get a needle in my bottom. The sharp, tart stench of other people’s vomit crowds thickly at me as I descend. I feel like I’m climbing down into a Breughel painting. On the deck of the surgery the crew’s changing the carpet in the corridor, because it’s been splashed with the vomit of so many people. The carpet, me, the cabin, we’re all branded by smell.

‘I am never, ever going on a sea voyage again,’ I declare to my mother, at the airport, on my return. I mean it.

And now, Antarctica. To get to it I have to cross the Great Southern Ocean. My World Book tells me it’s the roughest ocean in the world.

‘It’s the chance of a lifetime, isn’t it? I have to go. I can’t not. I can’t say no, can I?’