I’m on the bow. Blanca comes up behind me and puts her arms around my waist like a lover. My stomach dips.

She points to the penguins fanning away on the ice from the ship’s slice. They waddle like fast metronomes in their panic. Then they flop to their bellies and slide, flipper-propelled, on the smoothness.

‘They’re like, what you call, surf boys paddling out to a wave!’

I laugh but say nothing. I want Max with me in all of this. There are shouts from several people at the tip of the bow.

‘There she is!’

And there far away ahead of us are low and sensual hills of snow. They’re peppered by black rock. Landfall, at last.

In the draining light the ship batters reluctantly at the toughest of the ice. A ragged Australian flag journeys slowly up the mast and in a canny response, two long paths of brightness reach out to it from searchlights somewhere on the coast. Something stirs within us, belly deep. It’s been six weeks since we’ve seen land. For most of the crowd on the bow, this is the first time to Antarctica. The darkness grows dense. A bunched dotting of lights comes on from buildings in the low hills ahead.

‘There are so many!’ William says, his voice sagging. I can hear the disappointment. He wants the frontier.

The ship slides to a halt several kilometres from the station. William comes up and kisses Blanca and me on the cheek; there are tears and hugs and cameras and kisses all around us. I want Max beside me. I want a public kiss. I reckon it’d be allowable in all this thick emotion of—finally—Antarctica.

Max is two hundred and fifty kilometres away. The only way he can get to me is a five-hour chopper ride. And he’d need a bloody good reason. I go down below to email him. The computer room’s empty and I bang out words swiftly to him.

‘Are you fucking him?’

It’s Jim. His voice is behind me. Scrunched over the computer, I hadn’t heard him. I turn, caught out, furious, flushed.

‘Jim, this is none of your business, mate.’

‘’Course it is, it’s ship business.’

He gets his computer disk slowly out of his pencil case.

‘Haven’t you been a busy little girl.’ He smiles. ‘Be careful you don’t get yourself into trouble, Miss Lois, that’s all I’m gonna say.’

‘Jim, this is something private between Max and me, okay?’

‘You do know his situation back in the real world, don’t you?’

‘Yes. I do.’

I turn back to the computer and save the document and send it into cyberspace and step swiftly past Jim’s smirk. I don’t know Max’s situation in the real world. Not really.