I unfold like a sea anemone in the sudden solitude of my room. A space of my own for the first time in five weeks. It’s a converted shipping container from the nineteen-fifties and it’s dubbed a donga. It’s heaven. Tense wire ropes hold it taut to the ground. There’s a small square escape hatch in the roof, for anyone who gets trapped inside during a blizzard. There’s a thick window above the pillow on a narrow dipping bed. The window’s record-cover sized and densely scratched. The world’s wide and too beautiful outside.

I spread my backpacks around the room, I gut them and spill celebratory mess in my sudden sweet alone.

Solitude like cool mud seeps through me. My toenails get cut, my clothes get thrown off, I chatter and potter and fart. It’s the spillover accommodation for summerers. Winterers and essential summering personnel get carpeted rooms in the new steel living quarters with their ski resort luxury. I like the cramped history of my old donga. My fingers run along its grimy surfaces and I imagine the beards that’ve slept here in the past.

I’m lying naked by myself for the first time in weeks and I savour the feel of my skin against the sheets. I flip onto my belly and raise my shoulders like a seal and stretch to the window’s view. Bergs, ship, sky. I drop, flip, and put my hand into the moistness between my legs. Max. I dress and walk to the communications centre and dial an extension to his room. It costs nothing. Jack answers. He says, laughing, not you again, and puts Max on. The satellite delays his talk by an awkward second. I drink his voice like a tonic.

Max tells me he might just make it to Davis before I leave. He says the Mawson project is almost finished and they’re pushing for a chopper ride earlier than scheduled. He tells me I have to try to delay the ship.

‘I’ll put a fork in the diesel hose.’

We chuckle.

‘Just don’t tell the greenies.’

He tells me about a woman called Anya, a woman who was quiet on the ship. She’s blossomed at Mawson. He tells me of Anya’s dancing in the bar at night, and of her flirting, and of men circling.

‘She’s one of those women who are down here to have a good time. She’s really letting her hair down.’

He says they’ve become mates. He tells me about Anya’s slip-on parka that she always needs help to get off, because she can’t do it by herself.

‘It’s so funny.’