It’s magnificent. I wish you were here! You know what we are, Finny? Lovers of light. There’s a word for it, I found it in the Davis library. Photophiliacs. People who seek out light and the phenomena associated with it. It makes us sound like something vaguely obscene, doesn’t it? I can’t believe that this place of ice and snow and water is a desert. Let’s get out into other deserts when we get back. More sunsets! More skies! Yes!

One morning there’s a familiar creak in the wall behind my head as I wake. The ship’s gently rocking from an ocean swell. It’s been so long since we’ve felt it. Out of the porthole is the pure blue of ocean, dipping and heaving. Drops of water flash past the window. It’s as though the ship’s melting, its festive covering of snow slipping away.

By the afternoon I’m queasy again. Shit.

Tyrel grins as he hands over the last of his patches. Helen’s told me he’s the only one left on the ship with them.

‘I could do a roaring trade on the black market, couldn’t I?’

He brushes away my offer of money. Tells me to use the bathroom of his cabin to put it on. While I’m washing my hands he sits against the door on the other side and says that he doesn’t mind if I have to do the old technicolour yawn because he can’t smell it anyway. I ask him why. He tells me he lost his sense of smell in a car accident fifteen years ago. I ask him what smell he misses the most. There’s a long silence. He says the smell of a woman. There’s another silence. I don’t say anything. He says other countries. He says he’s more depressed now, generally, because of it. There’s another silence. He moves away from the door.

Tyrel is at his desk, his back to me, when I step from the bathroom. He doesn’t turn around when I say thank you and see ya. It hits me, as I walk out the door, that maybe there was the beginning of a love scene in there somewhere. And that Antarctica didn’t have a smell. I realise I have an immense fondness for bloody stubborn strange old Tyrel.

Zero degrees. Expeditioners celebrate by wearing shorts and T-shirts. I can feel a lifting of hearts among them—an Aussie summer, its slippery sensuous air, is somewhere ahead. The expeditioners go out onto the swiftly moving deck, they hold their heads to the wind like dogs in the back of a ute.

I’m feeling weighted. Everything’s drawing to a close too swiftly. Max emails and taunts me with Antarctica.