We’re on the bow. He’s got the quiet rapture of a small, grave schoolboy as he stands among the dithery flakes. He’s six foot three and he’s never seen snow.

Mark’s home is a wilting desert town in Western Australia. He’s thirty-two. He’s never been beyond the borders of his State. Until now. He’s a builder and he’s going to Mawson Station to help with a summer building program. He looks like a scruffy Viking with his dirty blond hair to his shoulders. His voice doesn’t belong to his body. It’s quiet and it’s careful and it betrays a deep shyness.

Mark says that when he found out he got the job, after a six-month application process, all his mates started handing him their cameras. He had requests for whales and icebergs and polar bears and every woman on the station. His best mate from primary school wanted a rock. Mark found out the day before sailing that he couldn’t collect any. So after the ship left the dock he went down to the galley and got a jar from Henry the cook. He’s going to fill it with Antarctic ice.

‘Sure it’ll melt, but when I get back to WA my mate can put it in his freezer and have a jar of Antarctica. You should do it too, Fin. Then you’d have a chunk of Antarctica forever.’

When I come into my cabin after lunch, there’s an empty jar on my pillow. Blanca winks from her bed. I tell her it’s not like that with me and Mark and she says yeah darling, sure.

We’re on deck making a snow woman and Mark has gone off to collect more snow when I suddenly hear softly and tenderly, hey there, as if he’s speaking to a lover. I turn. Mark’s crouching in a corner and he stands up with something squawking and biting and attacking his chest. Hey there, hey there. It’s a small bird. It’s snowy white, with a pitch black beak and feet. It’s young and panicking.

‘Thank God I’m not a woman,’ says Mark as the bird works itself into a frenzy with the material of his parka across his chest.

It’s a snow petrel. They’ve replaced the albatrosses circling the ship now that we’ve hit the ice. The birds call and dip and soar like angels in the sky around us. The one in Mark’s hands struggles and squawks and spits green slime down his parka. I laugh. Mark doesn’t. I tell him to put it down. It shouldn’t be held. It sits on the snow very still, quietly trembling. It makes a ratchety sound in the back of its beak, as if it’s trying to bring up phlegm.

‘Something’s terribly wrong for it not to be flying,’ I say.