We climb metal ladders to the sky. On one side, just, there’s the remnants of a sunset. On the other, against the darkness, there’s the beginning glow of an aurora, its promise. We stand still and quiet and the sky darkens from plum to ink and the aurora stirs and begins to dance, like a giant scribble of moving light in the sky. He shouts, there’s another—at the opposite end of the sky, a billowing green curtain—and then I shout because there’s another and another. Four auroras at once, fading and pulsing back, falling like patches of green rain on the high window of the sky. The two of us are jumping and shouting and laughing and pulling each other under another bit of sky and another and then we stop, raptured under it, then we’re businesslike and setting up our cameras on a railing and cold is trying to get into me, I can feel it, the hard wind. We take our pictures and he’s standing in front of me and taking my hands between his gloves and pressing them with great concentration and he’s rubbing my upper arms and hugging me warm, hugging away the hurting cold, and then we’re sitting quiet against a sheltered wall and I’m between his legs, my back is to him and his arms are around me tight as we watch our drive-in in the sky.

The insistent cold forces us below to our narrow bunks. Max doesn’t touch me goodnight, doesn’t kiss, just says see ya.

It makes me know, absolutely, that I want him. That he’s not gay.

It’s an achingly crisp blue day and the air seems so clean it hurts. Everything outside is so hard-edged and defined, it’s as if I’ve got new glasses with a too-strong prescription. The hurting light pushes me back inside, from the deck to the bridge.

‘I feel like my eyeballs have been scrubbed,’ Mark says. We commiserate over our aching sight and put on our sunglasses inside.

Max comes in, with Jack. There’s no signal of the everything of last night. Maybe he was just warming me, nothing more than that. There’s no flicker of a sign in his public greeting. Okay, so he was just warming me.

I don’t ask anything, I bounce back offhandedness in my greeting to them both. I move to another corner, contracting inside, not risking rejection and humiliation, not risking. He was just warming me.

It hurts. I have to leave. I walk out of the room. I feel foolish and naive. I hear footsteps behind me in the corridor. I turn. Max catches me up.