Max and I, alone in it all, want bogs and blizzards to slow the ship down. The days are slipping away and there’s a panic in our coming together. We grab, ferociously, the little time we’ve got.

The hull can only crack its way to within sixty kilometres of Mawson Station. It grinds to a halt in dazzling white ice that’s metres thick. A message comes bluntly over the intercom. Essential personnel only are to be choppered across to the station. At first light.

Max asks me to ask Blanca if he can sleep in our cabin on the final night.

‘I couldn’t ask Jack. He’d never forgive me.’

I hate the asking. I try to pick the right moment. I finally dive into it as time speeds away to bedtime.

‘Of course he can, darling.’

Blanca slaps me on the bottom. She’ll be sleeping right beside us.

Max and I, naked in our doona cave, fuck grave and quiet with my back rammed to his belly. One of his hands traps the cries in my mouth and his other’s firm and guiding over my pubic hair. We hardly move.

Blanca’s still and asleep, we hope, less than a metre from us. We’ve promised not to do anything, just hold and sleep. I’m almost under and then there’s a whisper, very close, I love you, and I smile warm and snug and sleep tightly by him and wake to his eyes watching mine. There’s a vast tenderness in them.

‘There’s so much trust in your sleeping, Fin. I never want to hurt that,’ he whispers.

I grab at his smell in the shower and I drink from the ribbon of water falling from his earlobe and drink from the pool in the hollow of his shoulder and just as he’s about to slide deep inside me there’s a knock. It’s Blanca. She wants the toilet.

We groan softly and laugh and yell just a minute! and Max says close to my ear that next time we’ll have to try an all-girls youth hostel because anything will be easier than all of this.

‘I don’t do this lightly,’ I say in the last swift drying.

‘Me neither.’

And we smile, wisely, at each other.

On the edge of the helideck there’s a public, final farewell for the Mawson group. I say goodbye to Callie with a long hug. And to Mark. He gives me a jar of melting ice and his address written neatly on a chocolate bar wrapper. Meg touches me on the shoulder and grins. Gino tells me to remember to wash my hands with olive oil and sugar if they ever get too dirty. Jack just smiles. I turn to Max. We touch swiftly and gently, cheek to cheek, among the people. Our skin feels like plastic as we come together.