I hold in my hand a small white rock. It’s the only tangible thing I have of Max. The airhostess offers me a newspaper on a tray. I say no. I can’t bring myself to read the news just yet. The hostess’ makeup is too thick on her skin. I can’t see her face properly.

Mum and Simon are at the airport and they drive me to my home. There’s a bone-white full moon. I lean my face outside the window and look up at it. The footpaths are buzzy and busy. It’s a summer Saturday night and in the honks and revs and shouts from the streets I feel like I’m back in the stinky belly of the city too quickly and I’m not quite ready for it yet.

In my apartment there’s champagne and flowers and photos and questions. Do I still have all my fingers and toes, how cold was it, what did I eat, what did I wear, was I scared, what was it like? Tyrel told me, as we stood for the last time together on the deck, that Antarctica is like sex—it’s really hard to explain it to someone who’s never experienced it. I tell them this. They laugh. They’re not convinced. They keep asking questions. A rude, slippery exhilaration shoots out of me, a bubbling life force. Laughter comes loudly and I want to swallow it away. It’s like I’m on a roller coaster of emotions.

That night, I can’t sleep in my high room. Pamela’s first telling, ‘Max is dead’, her deep tiredness, her weighted voice, bashes at my brain once again. The city bounces around my walls—cars starting, headlights, brakes, shouts, horns honking, glass smashing, feet running, people yelling, sirens. In my jagged wakefulness I feel too removed from the earth, too high up in my tall concrete apartment. The energy of it is wrong. My period still hasn’t come.

It’s raining on my twenty-seventh birthday. My windows are opened wide. I want to hear the sky.

We go to a restaurant by the beach. There are gifts and good wine and mediocre risotto and screams and camera flashes and the thump of the surf outside. I sit quietly in it all, listening to the rain easing. When the cake comes to the table I stand and blow out the candles and announce to my mum and Simon and four of my dearest friends that I’ve handed in my notice at work and am going to drive out to Alice Springs and live in the Central Australian desert for a while.