There are rumours of couples in the darkroom, a lab, a helicopter. I wonder whether Callie and Max are together somewhere.

I volunteer for slushy duty in the kitchen. It’s fun and chatty and wet and the cooks and the stewards are a good source of information. Two hundred and eighty dishes are washed with a high pressure hose in a single sitting and I’m soaking wet and knobbly-kneed at the end of it. The kitchen staff applaud as I leave.

They want to shave my head. It’s a ship tradition. I tell them I need my hair to keep me warm and I suggest Gino instead. They corner him in the bar. He says no bloody way. The crew suggest a compromise with his beard.

‘You’re not getting that. I couldn’t bear to face myself in the mirror every morning without my beard covering me up. Pick on someone else.’

Mark agrees to a public shaving on the trawl deck. With his long hair gone, he loses, stunningly, his looks. Andrea records the step-by-step transformation with her camera. At the end of it, I give Mark my beanie to keep himself warm. He puts it on and smiles thank you.

Henry asks me to be a judge at the upcoming talent night. I’m flattered. He says he’ll dress me. He tells me to go up and look at the ice before I do the dishes.

‘There’s a floe out there four kilometres across, Fin. It’s as big as a suburb.’

I stare at virgin-smooth ice through my glacier goggles. A snow petrel dips and soars around the ship. I’m sure Fin-tu’s dead.

Five: Scrubbed Eyeballs

FIVE

SCRUBBED EYEBALLS

Two black garbage bags are wrapped around my body. Masking tape in thick brown bands is strapping the plastic to me. Makeup is thick on my skin, I can feel the texture of it, the dryness. I haven’t worn makeup since Macquarie Island. It feels like a mask. I wear Henry’s blonde party wig and high shoes with thin heels. I step from behind two shower curtains limp with age and the scum of old soap. They’re strung, sagging, together. I step through the curtains to a wall of applause and wolf whistles and cheers. Men crowd to me. William swears he’ll never wash his arm again as I scrawl a heart in marking pen on his outstretched skin. Jim flips up his shirt. I scribble on his back. He moans and tells me to do it again. I laugh and push him away. I’m a visiting pop star, the talent night’s celebrity judge. I step in my spindly heels through the crowd in the bar to my plastic chair of honour.

Eyes are staring at my chest. My hand flutters across my breasts. My fingers tug at the plastic hem of my dress.