I tell him thank God the psychiatrists won’t be taking a look at me. We laugh. I’m excited, now, about getting back. There’s an anticipation deep in my bones. I’m excited about coming home and I’m excited about holding onto the scrubbed feeling that’s in me. I feel like I’ll be stepping off the boat with a core of calmness. My limbs feel loose, my mind alert. I’m ready.

I climb out of sleep with the knock on the door. There’s a moth-darkness that’s thickly around me. Someone’s calling my name. I snap out of sleep. My heart thuds with the urgency of the voice in the dark. It’s Helen. I step, rumpled, into the glare of the corridor and my hand rubs at my eyes. There’s a phone call. A graveness has dropped like a mask over Helen’s face. The only clue I get, as she propels me to the bridge, is the gentleness in her hands.

The first thing I notice on the bridge are the very bright lights. The room never has lights on at night. Captain Crane and Ivan stand side by side and there’s a knowledge in their tender glance that I know nothing of. My fingers feel suddenly detached and light and dry as I step into the radio room and the door is shut carefully behind me and I pick up the phone with a questioning hello. There’s the scratch of Antarctica in the line. It’s Pamela. I ask her how she is as if I’m trying to stall something, I don’t know what. She tells me she’s okay. She sounds utterly drained. She tells me she has some bad news. Max is dead.

There’s a strange floating feeling, a serenity and a centredness in me as she begins to tell me and then I say oh no over and over again under her words. Oh no oh no oh no in an octave lower than I’ve ever used before. It’s like some terrible chorus. Then panic rises like bile in my throat.

Pamela tells me a blizzard blew up on Max and Jack’s walk. Max had gone out to watch the sunset and when he didn’t return Jack radioed the station and they had to wait for the weather to drop before they could get the choppers out. They found Max in a snow cave. He was curled up. They don’t know when he died.

His body has been brought back to the station.

Pamela tells me, with great concern, to look after myself. She says to make sure people are with me. I hang up the phone very carefully.

‘Max is dead.’

I can’t scrub from my mind Pamela’s first telling, the weight in her voice, her words.

‘Max is dead.’