‘How good’s your aim?’ he turns and says quietly to me. We laugh. The noise punches into the talk. Heads turn. I feel like a schoolgirl at the back of the class. His voice isn’t Jim’s. When the lecture’s over I smile in farewell and he smiles back and I get out of the room quickly. I’m scared that if I say anything, I’ll spoil it all.

‘It’s an urban myth,’ says the doctor ahead of me in the cafeteria line. ‘Your appendix is perfectly safe. The only people who have to have them removed are us doctors. And that’s because a Russian doctor got appendicitis in the early sixties and had to operate on himself. He used a local anaesthetic, a scalpel and a mirror. And the chef as an assistant. The appendix is still at a Russian station, in a jar, on display, as a warning to the rest of us.’

I imagine it, vividly, as I wait for my banana sandwich. Imagine slicing into my belly with a scalpel, the uprush of blood, lifting the inflamed appendix out, sewing up my own skin, the small tents of flesh as the thread drags through it. I’m not very good with blood.

‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ says the doctor, smiling, into my thoughts. ‘No-one dies in Antarctica anymore.’

He can’t help with the belly ring. He says to take it out.

The night before departure the pub across from the dock is dense with noise and smoke and smells of beer and sweat. It’s a pre-sailing Antarctic tradition and there are expeditioners and partners and parents and mates. Hans, a Division official, introduces me to tight groups of people. They check out the clothes. From the women there’s shyness and reticence and suspicion, and from the men, curiosity. Hans drifts away. I look for the man who sat next to me in the auditorium. I can’t see him and I’m relieved.

I wander, get another drink, catch conversation scraps. A man tells two others, ‘Mate, she fucks like a vomiting dog.’ They stop and stare as I pass. I go to the toilet. I look at myself in the mirror. The lights are blue so people can’t find their veins for needles. Hobart surprises me. I’m definitely wearing too much makeup. I scrub away my browned city-lips. My belly ring’s hurting. I flip up my shirt. The skin around my navel’s red and puffy. I push the ring out. I’ll leave it with Mum for when I get back.