‘Thank goodness, Fin, I’ve got strong willpower. You know what I do? I distract myself by thinking about you. Your swimmer’s body. Oh God, I can’t describe how much, how desperately I want it.’

He tells me his Mawson project is finished and he’s just waiting for the chopper out. He tells me Pamela’s being difficult with the scheduling but there’s a slim, slim chance that he’ll be at Davis before I go.

I’m wet as I hang up.

Dip plonks down opposite me in the mess at breakfast.

‘The tour is continuing. Come, I’m spiriting you away.’

I grab my tape recorder. He takes me to the big, jolly red fire station shed.

‘Fire’s one of the biggest dangers. We can’t afford to have our shelter burn down and all our supplies destroyed. Because then we’re stuffed. And bloody freezing.’

As we walk out to the shed he tells me the baby seals are looking good.

‘You’ll just have to make sure the pups don’t suck those titties of yours.’

‘Don’t say things like that,’ I snap. He has to be told. His words don’t sit right. It’s as if Dip’s missed out on learning the ways of behaviour back home because of the years he’s spent down south. As if he’s learnt from Antarctica codes of conduct towards women from men who were pulling his leg.

‘I don’t like it when you say things like that, Dip.’

He laughs and pulls back, stung.

Pamela won’t let me beyond the station limits because I’m the only expeditioner who hasn’t undertaken the extensive and rigorous field training. So I walk the station. Its limits extend three kilometres from the buildings. I walk beyond the hum of the generator and stop and listen to the silence of the land. It’s thick. I try to record it. I can’t capture it.

Max emails about his walks in the hills around Mawson. I tell him to stop gloating.

Those exquisite moments of standing beneath an ice cliff. The ice feels like Waterford, smooth and diamond hard. And then to hear the wind funnelling around it, to hear the ice crack and pop and then be silent. Oh, my sweetness! Just to listen to the nothingness, punctuated by the ice splintering. The ice is alive with sound, but you have to be still to hear it.

He’s finished his project. He potters and writes about the people scurrying around him.

It seems to me everyone here has to fill their lives with trivia, keeping themselves busy, never experiencing anything of this life. But then I’m feeling so alive at the moment, they probably look at me and think how unproductive, spending all that time drinking coffee and staring into space.