I was going to get married once. It ground to a halt in the weeks before the wedding. He was a man who was never quite comfortable with the worker and the money-earner in me. So I modified myself, reduced myself for him. I said to my mother, in the rubble after it all, that I’d never love anyone so deeply again. My mother smiled and said I would and it’d be richer and deeper and stronger and I’d thought at the time, oh yeah, what does she know.

Mum was right.

The luxury of Max cushions my days. I feel a strange calm. It settles over me like a great warmth.

Seven: Legoland

SEVEN

LEGOLAND

An Antarctic map a metre wide is spread under glass on a table on the bridge. There are no lines in some coastal areas. Just dashes, or blanks next to the confidence of the blue lines that detail the known edge of the continent. The mapmakers still don’t know where ocean ends and land begins under some of the great tongues of ice that push out into the sea. The glaciers thwart them still.

Our ship approaches.

William’s seated beside me. His fingers tap on the chair arm. As we get closer the ship’s bridge is his auditorium. There’s the concentration of an audience thickly about him as he sits high up in the birdwatching chair. He quotes Coleridge, quietly, as the ship breaks through the last of the tough ice to the coast.

“‘The ice was here the ice was there the ice was all around, it cracked and growled and roared and howled like noises in a swound.”’

The ice against the hull obliges. We laugh.

William’s wanted to get to Antarctica since he was a child. He carries with him a folded map of the continent. It’s thinly worn in the grooves of its folds. William’s had the map since he was ten. It’s got a lot more blank spaces on it than the map on the bridge. He’s applied for the longest stint possible—eighteen months. It has taken him six attempts to get the snow petrel job. As he sits, leaning forward, his fingers tap and tap and tap as if he’s sending a morse code message.

I feel alive. New. I feel as though layers have been peeled from my skin and eyes and mind. I feel as nervy as a schoolkid in a T-shirt in winter before the big race at an athletics carnival. I’m buzzy and heady with it and I want to get out of the ship’s small spaces and onto the land as soon as possible. William too.

The ship sails up to Davis Station through an avenue of icebergs. There are five hundred or more of them. They shine like white plastic in the hurting light.