I tell Max that Jim knows about us. That he asked me if I knew about Max’s situation in the real world. Max laughs and says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and that Jim’s jealous and to forget it.

The nag of Anya’s parka comes with me to my bed, now sour with loneliness.

Eight: Men

EIGHT

MEN

Dip’s a plumber. His workshop’s neatly contained within two walls and a ceiling of topless women. Topless women are on the screensaver on his computer and on the noticeboard in his room. He takes me to his bedroom as part of his guided tour. There’s a rumpled boyish boarding school bed. There’s a small square window in the wall behind it. Dip tells me that nitrogen’s trapped between the two layers of thick glass to barricade in the heat from the building. We lean side by side at the view. Our arms touch. I draw my arm away.

‘It’s my million dollar view. I reckon it’s the best piece of real estate in the world.’

Outside is the frozen white sea and the big bowl of blue above it. On Dip’s windowsill there’s a row of thin, flat shells the colour of babies. He tells me he’s collected them from icebergs near the shore that have rolled.

He collects beer cans too. ‘We put them on the bamboo marker poles when we go on long distance traverses, and then the radar picks them up and we can find our way back.’ He collects Russian hats from the Russian base. ‘They’re made of bear or rabbit or something. Twenty bucks, the guys sell ’em for. I reckon they’d go for five on the streets of Moscow.’

He takes me to the science block where he shows me a deep freezer whose lid he lifts like a tomb. Inside are layers of frozen animals and faeces. They’re packed to the brim and they’re in clear plastic bags that crackle with cold.

‘That’s my snow petrel and my Adélie, and my seal poo. I pick it all up when I’m out in the field. It’s all for the scientists.’

A dead smell clusters in a thick concentration around the stiff snow petrel he holds in his hand, even though the body’s trapped in plastic and frozen solid. I think of the warmth and cheek and chatter of Fin-tu.

I tell Dip I want to get out, beyond the station. He says Pamela won’t let me because I haven’t done field training. I tell him I have to go beyond the station limits. He says he’s open to bribes.