Wesley gets out the thermos. He scrabbles in his pack and slaps his forehead. He’s left the teabags behind. The dryness of the air has made us all ferociously thirsty. We tell him we don’t care. We drink the hot water and in our mouths and our throats the liquid has the thickness of taste.

I’m cold now, sitting still. Twenty minutes ago I wanted to rip away layers of my clothing, like a heat-maddened walker in a sandy desert. I zip up my freezer suit. We eat and then for a long time we sit, letting the stillness of the land seep into us, the immense calmness of it all. Wesley takes out the radio and contacts the communications centre, letting the station know the group’s okay and on schedule. We pack up and head back. My leg’s stiffened with the sitting. As I walk my eyes focus grimly on the footprints ahead of me. I feel a tugging in my groin. Dammit, I’ve got to go. I yell for everyone to hang on and Blanca comes back and says thank goodness darling. She has to go too.

We walk over a ridge. I can’t find a tide crack. I peel off my clothes and crouch. I piss strong and hot like a horse. The air on my legs and my backside is savagely cold. I redress, my fingers jumbled and wrong in my rush. I kick snow over the yellow stain. Blanca says to wait, that she has to do a number two. She gets out a plastic bag with a sigh.

‘Oh darling, now it won’t come. I am thinking all of it too much!’ she wails.

We laugh. She strains and groans and finally stands up and puts a small, neat package in her backpack.

‘I do not think I will ever come back to Antarctica,’ she says without smiling and walks past me.

We walk and walk. I focus on the footprints ahead of me. Voices come back at me and arms are suddenly pulling me to a tall rump of smooth snow by our side. Andrea tells me I can’t go to Antarctica and not bumslide. We climb, I don’t know how I do it and when we’re very high I sit with my knees gathered tightly to my chest and I’m off tumbling with the rest of them. Bumslides slip into rolls, arms and legs loosen in the speed of the falling, faces thud into snow and we are rolling over and thudding and laughing and whooping and screaming and coming to a stop in a heap of wet white at the bottom. Our bodies are smeared from head to toe with snow.

We walk on. Pain screams into my buttocks. We walk and walk. Finally, finally there’s a radio pole on a hill ahead of us. Almost there. On our return my teeth are clenched tightly behind my smile.