While Jack’s at lunch Max reads aloud to me on the couch in his cabin. From The Little Prince. He relishes the speaking parts. I laugh. My concentration wanders and comes back and I get him to repeat the lines that I want to hear again. My arms are around my bunched knees beside him. He’s leaning against my arm. His skin is against mine. It feels natural; it makes me not want to move. He’s stroking my arm. My head is in his lap. He pauses and begins his reading again. I breathe in his smell. His fingers are like a trickle of water on my skin.

He stops reading.

‘I’d really like to make love to you this afternoon.’

I raise my head and consider him, grave.

‘Me too.’

And we smile at the impossibility of it all. Max shares a cabin with one person and I share with two. The only place we can be by ourselves for any length of time is outside. In an average temperature of –20°C that buries our bodies under six layers of clothing that can’t be taken off.

‘Ah, shipboard life,’ Max says.

As the ship breaks through the ice the scraping against the hull sounds at times like fingernails down a blackboard. In the background often now, in the ship’s shuddering progress, is the ice’s shriek.

In the long, slow line at dinner time Max tells me casually that Jack’s allowing us to have their cabin until nine-thirty that evening, two hours to the dot, to finish the final chapters of The Little Prince.

And so it begins.

Six: The Desire for Blizzards and Bogs

SIX

THE DESIRE FOR BLIZZARDS AND BOGS

The ship’s bogged by the white that’s closing in around it. We’re wedged tight by the pressure as the hull tries to squeeze between floes. The floes can’t move to allow the ship’s progress because they, too, are jammed tight by the push of the ice mosaic around them. At the wheel is Patrick. He can’t free the ship. He calls Ivan, the Swede.

‘Don’t worry, Fin, the Viking’s at the helm now.’

Ivan puts on his Mozart. He can’t get us free either. He calls Captain Crane over the intercom. The captain steps into the room and tugs at his baseball cap and takes the wheel and after twenty minutes or so he starts what he calls the wriggle.

‘I’m artificially rocking it, Fin, by moving water in the ballast tanks from one side of the hull to the other. It’s on a two-and-a-half-minute cycle. It’ll cradle you to sleep if you don’t watch it. How’ve you been sleeping. Okay?’

I smile and nod. My arms wrap around my body. I feel wet. I feel delicious. I feel loved. No-one knows, but Max and I and Blanca and Jack. Andrea suspects.