William, the snow petrel biologist, comes hesitantly to me and tells me that years ago he worked in a radio repair shop. He can’t promise anything. He takes my machine and with delicate pianist’s fingers unscrews the back and carefully picks out the machine’s guts so that a mass of red and green and white wire entrails spill from it. He picks at and rearranges the wires. After a very long time William finally looks up and declares the machine, tentatively, fixed.

I kiss him on both cheeks and he flushes deeply, first his neck, then his whole face. He says he loves fixing things, that it’s nothing special.

I continue my work. My aim is to eventually capture almost everyone on the ship: why they’re here, how it’s working out, what they’re missing. Jim catches me interviewing Mark in a quiet corner of the rec room. His voice comes in over the top of our talk.

‘I thought I’d fixed that thing once and for all.’

I turn off the tape recorder.

‘Mate, go away. You’ve already done enough damage.’

He smiles and blows me a kiss.

In a slice of a room in the belly of the ship I find a place to be alone. The gym. I’m in there every day. I wear my pyjama shorts and a T-shirt and turn the music up loud. It’s like a glass of wine after a frantic day. I begin to crave it.

Tyrel finds it.

He begins to come in the middle of my sessions and there’s nothing I can do to stop him. I snap off the sound and leave soon after he enters.

I stop going and begin pacing the deck instead. I’m always checking on Fin-tu. He’s getting cheekier. He knows I mean meat and he can read the sound of my footsteps. Sometimes he’ll chatter in his ratchety voice and spit and stretch out his wings and fold them back in again. He never makes an attempt to fly. I don’t want him to now.

In a flat patch of ice, Adélie penguins scurry from the slice of the ship. They leave tracks in the ice like lines on a hand. In a channel between floes there are Minke whales, their deep grey backs breaking the water’s surface in a calm arc.

I walk the decks. Mark comes up often to check on Fin-tu, as do William and Callie. I stop and chat and walk the decks again. I stand still on the helideck and curl my fingers into the mesh of the tall fence and put my face to the cold wire. My body weight bounces on the fence, challenges the tension. I’d last less than a minute in the water.