Tyrel’s suddenly behind me, on the far side of the deck. His small tight figure is hunched into his parka. I imagine him pushing me overboard. It’d be twelve hours or more before anyone would realise I was missing and it’d be quick and so easy. The perfect crime. A thrillingly glamorous way to go. I walk to another deck and lean over the railing and water gushes up from the split in the ice below me, like blood from a deep wound.

I’d thought about suicide once, long ago, when a relationship broke apart three weeks before we were going to marry. I’d thought of jumping from my high apartment window, of striding into the sky. I look back now and think how stupid it was, to think of doing that, for a man. But I’d wanted him so savagely haunted.

I think about that line from Huckleberry Finn, ‘I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead’, as I kneel in the snow on the very tip of the bow under a sky that’s thick with stars. I listen. There’s the soft whoosh of the splitting ice below me, its protesting squeak and plup as it buckles under the insistent iron. I watch a hairline crack in the ice journey far and split wide as the ship cuts its course.

There’s a shooting star, and then another. There’s no wind. I feel like we’re sailing into a silent and strange place where we’ve no right to be. Cold creeps into my clothes and I go below.

Tyrel looks up from inside his cabin as I pass his open door. He watches me.

Ivan puts Mozart on loud and sails into a headwind to protect us during our barbecue on the trawl deck. The deck’s low, at the rear of the ship. It’s –15°C. There’s a velvet blanket of a sunset sky. Among the expeditioners there are Rudolph red noses and difficulties in negotiating sausage sandwiches with woollen gloves on.

‘I reckon this would have to be the only Aussie barbie I’ve ever been to that doesn’t have flies,’ Max says. He fishes out a chocolate bar from Jack’s pocket and tells me I have to eat it because it’s energy food and a vital staple of an expeditioner’s diet. He tries to force it into my mouth.

I hit him with the back of my hand across his chest and we laugh and stare out at the icebergs. He goes to get another sausage sandwich. Blanca sidles up beside me and tells me she’s not seeing her sailor anymore. All she will tell me is that she’s too clever to love him. She won’t say who he is.