There are two six-foot-long couches. They’re face to face, with a slim space between them. I lift the base of one and it flips, reluctantly, into a bunk. Another bunk’s strapped flat against the wall. Processed air hums. The walls are close.

It’s home for the next five weeks.

A neat line of matching luggage already claims one of the couches. My gaggle of boxes and backpacks and trunks and shopping bags is dumped on the other couch. I’m sharing with two other women I know nothing about.

The bathroom’s like a spaceship capsule. Everything’s small and plastic. I go to the toilet, then afterwards, when I depress the lever, nothing happens. I depress it again. I’ve done one very large shit and it’s not going anywhere. I can see bits of my dinner from last night in it.

Bad, bad start.

I knock on the cabin next door and hope I’ll be back before either bunkmate wants to use the bathroom. The door of the adjoining cabin’s ajar. I see an arm with thick veins reaching up to put a Scotch bottle on a shelf. It’s him. Oh no. The door opens.

It’s not him.

‘What?’ No friendliness or curiosity or welcome in the voice.

I tell him my toilet isn’t working and he says none are and the engineers are trying to fix the problem and that at this very moment they’re wading waist-deep in the sewerage tank and a message came over the intercom fifteen minutes ago. I was on deck.

I tell him I’m the journalist and he says uh huh. I tell my name and he says I know. He doesn’t tell me his.

I go back to my cabin. Bad start.

Andrea Everitt extends her hand. She shaves her chin. There’s a peppering of black hairs, their blunt beginnings. Maybe she’s into steroids. Andrea’s from Wollongong. She’s lean and toned and pretty and she’ll be sleeping a metre above me for the next six weeks.

We unpack. We find the lightswitch and turn it on because the mean salt-scoured porthole doesn’t let in much daylight. Andrea tells me she’s a glaciologist. She describes herself as obsessed by ice. She’s going to Antarctica to help measure the largest glacier in the world.

‘It’s the most incredible feeling, to put your bare hand on an iceberg, to touch its stillness.’