That night I stand on the bridge with Ivan and Patrick and William. We stare behind the ship. It looks like the gates of hell. Snow flurries furiously in the orange reflection of the hull in the lights, as if we’re in the middle of a great burning furnace of ice.

Max speaks to me via email from Mawson. He hasn’t been able to begin his seal work. The weather’s conspired against him. He says the station buildings are ugly and nothing to write home about. He says he, too, is trapped in a blizzard.

Looking out from the living quarters it’s like being in a fishbowl or submerged in a spa. I’ve got a blizzard within me too. I watched you sleeping that final night, your head on my arm, and I felt completely overwhelmed. I’m in trauma, Fin. Like a seal dive response. Will I come out alive/unscathed/intact/a more loved person? Definitely the latter. Someone touched me in a most dramatic way and that was you.

Max’s words buoy my days. Blanca sits on her bunk and reads my face as I read his emails that are slipped under the cabin door by Paul, the communications officer. He prints them out for me and I trust he’s keeping our secret. Sometimes the emails come in several times a day. Blanca chuckles and claps as I surface from reading them.

‘Oh darling, you are gone, you are gone.’

In the days after Max’s departure I sweat the smell of his skin and our sex from my pores as I work out in the gym. At night I breathe into the pillow and sheets that have soaked his smell into them. I want to roll in his smell like a dog.

‘Ask her what colour they are!’

Jim’s yell soars across the mess as a plumber leaves to take a phone call from his wife. It’s just been announced over the intercom.

‘Just for you, Stiff,’ the plumber yells back.

I ask Tyrel what they’re referring to. He tells me, tightly, that they’re talking about the wife’s underpants and he says he wishes I’d stop asking stupid questions about stupid things. (What is his problem?)

I email Max. He tells me that Tyrel was in Antarctica a year, the first time he was sent down, to look after the supplies and equipment. He tells me that before he went he organised a single red rose to be delivered to his wife back at home. It arrived every Friday that he was away. It cost him a fortune and his wife ran off with the man who delivered the roses. And Tyrel doesn’t talk about it. Ever.