‘You need to be escorted!’ someone yells.

No I don’t. It’s my first chance to be alone in a very long time and I’m seizing it. I want to walk along the ice, I want to feel it and hear it. And I want to record it.

William accepts a lift. I’m relieved. He’s handed a set of headphones for the Hagglunds. He climbs up into the cabin and waves to me and I raise my thumb in reply. There’s a complicity to our joy.

The bashed-at orange hull of the ship looms above me. It has been scraped to grey in strips by the protesting ice. Shavings of paint, like curls of orange rind, rest on upturned ice that has bouldered in front of the ship. I touch a vertical row of icicles, head-height, on the spine of the bow. As I walk away I step over a crack in the ice and there’s a flash of deep grey sea beneath me. I head, quickly, for the bulldozed ice highway.

There’s a carnival bustle on the decks as sailors prepare to unload several thousand tonnes of cargo and enough diesel to last the station a year. It’s pumped to the station tanks through a thick rubber hose. Someone wolf whistles. I look up. It’s Len. He’s in a hardhat. I yell to him to come on down. He yells back, no way Hose-ay.

I walk over the ocean with my esky over my shoulder and my microphone in my hand. There’s the sharp scrunch and squeak and crackle of my boots on the ice. The ship sounds recede. In the distance, oblivious, is a stately single file of penguins, black and white and steadily walking. They look like Italian nuns.

I catch my breath by a handmade roadsign. It’s as though the sharpness of the air is sucking the energy out of me. The sign’s a familiar yellow diamond with a handpainted picture of a penguin and the words NEXT TWO KILOMETRES. Thick silence presses in on my ears. I wonder what Max is doing, if he’s out there somewhere in the silence too. A Hagglunds chugs towards me and toots and I wave away a lift. Jim stares at me out of the back window, smiling ironically.

Ahead is a scattered collection of brightly coloured buildings. They look like huge steel shipping containers. Legoland, it’s dubbed. I walk to it, not knowing where the sea ends and the land begins beneath me.

Jim’s by the door of the main building, shooting some footage with his video camera. He catches me in the frame and won’t let me go.

‘Stop it!’ I laugh, annoyed.

As he opens the door to let me through I ask him to keep what we’d spoken about in the computer room confidential. I say please Jim, please.

‘Don’t worry, you can trust me.’