Andrea’s not at the barbecue. Neither’s Tyrel. While Jim tells me about plans for a talent night and how his stereo and walkman and watchstrap are all broken, I look across at Max. He’s laughing with Callie in a corner. He offers her some chocolate. She takes it. Maybe he isn’t gay. Jim drifts away.

Gino comes up to me.

‘Hey, birdwoman!’

He untwists his beer bottle cap in his eye socket. He wants to show me photos of his family. Gino’s surname is Fortunasso and his Antarctic nickname is Lucky Bum. He’s a diesel mechanic and he’s twenty-four, the youngest tradie on the ship. In his cabin I learn a new word. Stickmags. Porn magazines. Gino has a lot. I want to have a look but he pushes his photo album under my nose. There are stern wedding photos of his parents and snaps of his sisters and his boat and his hotted up V8 in the driveway of a large brick suburban home. There are lots of photos of his two year old niece.

‘She’s my baby.’

We chat for a while about nothing much, then he puts the album away.

‘What I do feel, Fin, is that Antarctica is going to change me. It’s this really strange feeling. I’ve never had it before. Getting this job is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me.’ He talks about his father who came to Australia from Malta in 1949 and worked long days and nights as a mechanic and eventually lost all the sensitivity in his fingers through years of accumulated grease and it was like that for a very long time; then one day his father came home from work and cleaned his fingers with olive oil and sugar and he got his touch back. After Gino’s story we look at each other and smile.

‘I’ve been told that everyone comes back from Antarctica a different person.’

‘Hey, me too, Fin. Do you ever get that feeling that your life hasn’t really begun? That it’s all supposed to start next month or next year, but it never does, kind of?’

The ocean’s black ink between the floes. Clean, cold air is like a tonic in my lungs after the warm insides of Gino’s cabin. The night’s soaked in stillness. The world around me seems snap-frozen. I make my way to Fin-tu. Just in time to see a figure bending over his box, picking up his feathery flapping whiteness in clumsy outstretched hands and a man striding to the railing and my voice my body is caught with the shock and I don’t move and I don’t speak until his arms are out over the rails.

‘Tyrel!’