I’m silent. Then I look at him. ‘Maybe it was. I don’t know. It just gave me a hell of a shock. I couldn’t speak to you I was so stunned.’

Tyrel tells me he couldn’t explain because he’s not very good at speaking. He says Antarctica teaches you to speak out and say what’s on your mind but he’s never quite got the hang of it. He apologises, sternly, about doing what he did to Fin-tu and I realise then that his sternness is like the crust of a pie, that there’s something churned up and confused and soft and hurting inside. Maybe Max was right, maybe Tyrel isn’t so bad. I see good everywhere now, in my big balloon joy.

He pushes me out the door.

The ship’s parked each night in the ice. It stops as darkness drops. There’s a minefield of bergs and pack ice in the big black around us. The engines are killed and the searchlights stay on; the bridge is in darkness, illuminated only by the bright screens and switches on the control panel. Max and I stand side by side in the gloomy far corners of the room. We stare at the snow darting through the two white highways of searchlight ahead of us and the sides of our bodies furtively touch.

I feel love spreading through my body like ink pluming into water. The certainty of it pushes the panic of alone from my sleep. I bask in its rescue. I feel a serenity through me, I feel taller in my walk of the ship.

When people are around us our talk is publicly loud and when they move on our conversation drops privately low. Sleeping a whole night together is out of the question. There are public goodnights in the corridor, nonchalant see yas, and then we’re off to our separate beds.

I’m up early, often, filing my stories. My concentration’s ragged. I don’t care. I’m deliciously distracted. I’m letting go of work a little. It’s healthy.

Daylight comes weakly and every morning Captain Crane climbs into his freezer suit. With binoculars strung around his neck he climbs the mast to plot the path through the thick ice ahead. If he can’t see well enough from his perch, he orders the chopper up. He takes me with him. For half an hour we sit in the chopper on the helideck while the engineers blow hot air through giant blow heaters at the engines to warm the oil. Then swiftly we’re winging high. The ship below becomes an orange toy in the vast white bathtub around it and then it’s gone. With a pad of graph paper and a pencil in his hand, Captain Crane draws the course that the ship will take. Humble hand-drawn crosses and lines chart our path.