I feel a small, mean thrill as I say it. Andrea doesn’t come back. I go to bed. Panic comes into the beginning of my sleep, pushing me awake late into the night. I think of Andrea and Patrick, of Jim and Max. What do I know of Max’s life? A privileged childhood, a brilliant student. A de facto relationship with a fellow biologist that split apart eight months ago. A very loved dog, a very loved garden, a half renovated house that’s giving him the shits. A city he wants to get out of, a life he wants to move away from. I don’t know why.

Our relationship has existed in such a strange bubble of self-containment. It’s a relationship that hasn’t involved family and friends and money and houses and history.

Sleep is sparse. The morning sky is a deep slate grey. Antarctica doesn’t look welcoming. Andrea is asleep above me and Blanca restless beside me. I find Captain Crane on the bridge with Len, a young sailor raw to his job. He’s mopping the vinyl.

‘I hate it, I just want to get home.’ Len’s a surfer. ‘It’s grey and it’s white and it’s cold and I hate it.’

‘But it’s changing all the time!’

‘Yeah Fin, it just gets colder.’

We look outside. The sky is as dark and deep and musky as a plum. It hangs low.

‘Who’d want to go out in that? You’d have to have a few screws loose.’

‘Well, Len, I want to go out in it.’

‘Don’t do it, Fin. It kills people, you know. It swallows them up and tosses them away like an umbrella on a beach. It crushes ships. It makes fingers drop off. And toes. Mate, I’m staying put on this ship for the whole time we’re here.’

The landscape outside looks wide and silent and waiting. Small islands poke up like teepees from the smooth sheet of sea ice. Sitting serenely above the mainland hills is the polar icecap. It’s the enormous sheet at the bottom of the world that curves from us to the South Pole to the opposite edge of Antarctica. It looks like it’s hovering.

‘A new weather forecaster arrived at Davis a couple of years back,’ says Captain Crane. ‘For a week he forecast low cloud to the west. It was the icecap. It took him a week to realise it. People auctioned for the right to tell him. Three slabs of beer won. The forecaster never lived it down. He never went south again.’

The Captain chuckles in his T-shirt and trackpants and baseball cap. ‘As soon as the unloading’s underway, I’m out of here, Fin. It’s my Davis indulgence, a run on the ice. There’s nowhere to do it on the ship. I’m busting for it.’