In the days of thick ice I wrap myself in his disciplined rockclimber’s body. I hold onto the strength in his vividly veined forearms when he’s deep inside me. Our bodies are always wedged tight together in crammed places. His fingers spread tenderly as he cradles my head like a baby’s so I don’t thud my crown against the close walls encasing us. Our cramped domains: his top bunk above Jack’s, with my feet flat and strong on the ceiling; his narrow, boy-grotty shower, with my chest and palms flat to the shower wall and his belly to my back; and the sliver of floor between the two couches in his cabin, with a foot high on each seat.

He holds his hand to my mouth to catch my coming and giggles urgently to me, you must be quiet, you must be quiet.

The voyage’s deputy leader is in the cabin next door. He’s a pinched man of cryptic crosswords and gossip. No-one must know. Max checks his watch. We shower. We fuck. I check my watch. We turn off the water. Max bends and with a towel dries me softly between my thighs. He dries my feet and between my toes. I kiss the strong hills of his spine.

The phone rings. Jack wants his cabin back.

I knock on Tyrel’s door and it opens curtly. He looks at me with surprise. I’m here because Max tells me I have to get it off my chest. In a rush I tell Tyrel that the snow petrel has been weighing on my mind and how upset I’ve been and that I can’t stop thinking about it and I just want to find out why he did it. That’s all.

Tyrel asks me into his cabin. I sit on the very edge of his bed. I notice whisky bottles and about twenty neat pairs of red socks hanging to dry on the back of a couch.

He sits at his desk and tells me that he loves animals much more than humans. He tells me that this is his eighth trip to Antarctica and even though he goes down to supervise the unloading of cargo it’s his passion for the wildlife that keeps him coming back. That’s the reason he paces the decks and stares at the sea and the sky. He tells me that he saw me day after day with a bird on the ground that should’ve been in the sky. He tells me that the bird wouldn’t have lived stuck in a box on the deck and it kept nagging and nagging him. He tells me that during the barbecue he’d sat in his cabin and had one too many Scotches and he’d gone up on deck to free the bird because he couldn’t stand it anymore.

‘I honestly thought it was the most humane thing to do.’