Max waves and blows kisses from the chopper as it shrinks into the sky, and then it’s gone.

The other expeditioners go quickly below. I’m alone on the deck.

I put my face to the cold wire of the fence. I have a certainty about Max. I know the rightness of it. My mother would tell me that nothing’s certain, that I’m blinded and that it’s too soon. But I know the rarity of it, its anchoring power. I know in the shudder that begins between my legs and travels through my bowels and up to my breasts. It hurts as I think of him.

Cold slices like glass into my cheeks and I want to get out of it before it kills the skin on my face because that’s what frostbite does, deadens flesh. My cheeks are always the first part of me to be defeated by the cold. It’s –55°C, with the windchill factor. Helen is warning us that exposed flesh will freeze in sixty seconds on deck. I’m on deck. For field training. In case we ever get caught in a blizzard on the continent. It’s as though we’re in a milk vat of snow.

For two days and two nights the wind has been screaming through the rigging in gusts of one hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. The ship is wedged still and tight in a base of ice. We can’t sail because we can’t see ahead. There is a slight lull in the blizzard and it’s bitingly cold and ten of us are on the snow-saturated helideck. We’re sitting in a line. William’s between my spread legs, his back to me, and my arms are tight around his waist. Andrea’s arms are tight around my waist and her head is sheltered in my neck. It’s called a penguin huddle. It’s a survival strategy. I’m getting colder sooner than anyone else. I always do. I have to go inside, the chill is pushing into my cheeks and I don’t want my flesh to die. I can’t go inside, I can’t make it across the deck by myself. I’ll be blown away. I’ll have to crawl. I don’t have the courage to break from the huddle. I can’t let the team down. The wind speed drops. I leave a gap in the line as I climb from the legs and the arms wedging me tight. My body is butted sideways but I make it across the deck in a crouching crablike scuttle. I’ve let the team down but I had to get inside, I didn’t want my skin to die.

I know now why they put small build, question mark on my medical form. I wish it was Max between my legs. My thighs tremble, thinking of him.