Jack’s getting tetchy. He wants his room back. I tell Max how I thought, for ages and ages, that they were gay. He tells me a lot of people think that, that it’s just the way of their friendship. He says they’ve known each other since uni, that Jack’s shy and they’re opposites but it works. He says the two of them have a mateship that’s very un-Australian, with none of the macho bullshit. I say it seems more like a friendship between women and he says yeah, it is, it’s good. His hand trickles between my legs. The phone rings. Our time’s up.

We roam the ship searching for places to be alone. The books in our hands are our armour against curiosity. We develop a public privateness. Our fingers knot in a nest of woollen jumper as we lean towards the windows on the bridge; our elbows touch at a communal bookreading in William’s cabin; we run fingers strongly down a spine in a recently emptied stairwell. Our time’s running out. Soon Max will leave me for Mawson Station and I’ll be sailing on to Davis. We grow bolder: kiss in corridors and risk a door opening or someone walking by. Kiss in stairwells. Entwine our ankles on the bridge.

Jack’s getting tetchier. Reducing our time alone in his cabin.

We make the move into my cabin in the certainty of the lunch hours. We hide giggly and sweaty under the doona when the door is opened and Blanca or Andrea comes inside and we thread our bodies tight together, legs under legs, sculpting the shape of one sleeping mound until they’re gone.

‘You must be quiet, you must be quiet.’

His tongue and a whisper like a soft moth in my ear.

When he comes to my bunk from outdoors his earlobes are soaked in chill. It’s as if they don’t belong to the rest of him and I warm them with breath and kiss. He holds my toes in the wet cave of his mouth.

The ship seems to stew in silliness around us as we head further west. The closest country’s now South Africa. Australian time is five hours ahead of us and Gino dubs Greenwich Mean Time Greenwich Really Nasty Time. Sixty-two people are crammed into a cabin. It’s a record. Expeditioners consume more food now than they did before Macquarie Island when there were twenty-five more people on board.

‘It’s boredom,’ says Henry. ‘And no-one’s seasick anymore.’

Mawson’s only a couple of days away. People begin to appear promptly at breakfast as if they’re bored with sleep too. There are fresh shirts and trimmed beards and shaved skin. I sense a relief at the coming of routine again.