Captain Crane stands at the wheel on the bridge. We watch the great dip and rise of the bow ploughing through the Great Southern Ocean. The sky’s different now, more complex. Clouds shunt stately across the sky’s width. They’re like slow trains at a depot, some to the left and some to the right. Captain Crane tells me tales of his other travels. Of washing his plate in the sand of the Sahara, of his cottage of six windows by a Swedish lake, of his children in several countries. I begin to think of soil on my hands, sun on my back, my fingers on the belly of a cat, the taste of bananas in my mouth and the smell of horses and bushfires and grass.

The ship picks up ABC radio as it sails under South Australia. The familiar news theme slices through the chatter in the mess. The expeditioners’ lunch time talk stops. There’s a focused listening to the clipped, velvet tones.

The first story is the rape and murder of a nine year old girl in Perth. For me, it’s too soon for all that. I don’t want the newsroom just yet.

Ivan turns back to his food. He tells me he has a deal with his wife—if anything goes wrong back home, she won’t tell him until he returns.

‘There’s nothing I can do at sea, Fin, except be frantic about it. I can’t get home any quicker.’

I’d have to know.

The Australian government gets back every piece of Antarctic gear we have, except for those things that were touching our skin. We line up in the mess and I hand across balaclavas and hats and shirts and trousers and parkas and, lastly, my Honest John freezer suit. The smell of my sweat’s deeply ingrained in it.

Tyrel’s beside me in the queue.

‘Now don’t go shoplifting when you get home, Fin.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, the expeditioners sometimes have this little problem when they return. They go into stores and take stuff off the shelves and walk out without paying. It’s because they’re so used to doing it in Antarctica.’

‘Tyrel, I don’t believe you.’

‘It’s true! There’ll be a team of psychiatrists on the next ship out—that’s when most of the winterers’ll be coming home—and the psychiatrists will be easing them back into the real world. Teaching them money again, shops, keys, that kind of thing.’