Max braves outside in a thin shirt. He wants to see his first iceberg without the barrier of thick glass. He yells at me to come too. I stay inside. I’ve gorged myself with imagining being with him and now it’s all gone. I suspect he’s gay. I’d be mad to go out on deck in my shirt.

An announcement’s put over the intercom. Suddenly there are people and pyjamas and binoculars and cameras and lights and exclamations all around us.

A sweep’s been held to guess the timing of the first iceberg sighting. Andrea’s closest. She’s with Patrick. I tell the capain that I’ll deliver her box of wine. I don’t know if he knows. I take the box back to the cabin and put it on Andrea’s bed and imagine what she’s doing at this very moment.

I go to sleep thinking of cliffs of ice and the sweet softness of skin to skin.

The bird demands with its stillness. I feed it krill collected by the marine biologists on the trawl deck of the ship, and galley scraps from Henry. It gets to know the smell of my arrival. It turns its head keenly and, eventually, without trembling. I won’t let it take the meat from my fingers. I don’t trust its beak. I worry about the stillness of its wings. It lives in a cardboard fruit box on a mattress of snow in a sheltered corner of the deck. William tells me it’ll leave when it’s able. Callie picks it up. Says maybe it has concussion.

‘It’s so young. Its wings haven’t fully formed. Maybe the wind bashed it into the side of the ship during a fog. It’s lucky it fell onto the deck and you two found it.’

She tells me it’s a he. She christens it Fin-tu.

‘Fin number two. Because you’re obsessed by him.’

‘No I’m not. It’s just that I like his company. We sit here by ourselves and watch the ice.’

She looks at me and shakes her head. ‘You city girls are very strange.’

Mark comes and sits quietly beside us. We stare out at the wide ice that’s impersonating land and he talks about the desert. How he used to play footy for his local town and his father trained him, put him in army boots and made him run ten kilometres a day behind the ute.

‘Walking and jogging and sprinting in these great big bloody boots, and then when I got onto the field, with the football boots on, I felt like I was dancing. I felt like a bloody ballerina!’