Inside my donga I sit on a low stool. I can’t move my leg, can’t climb into my high bed. It takes me twenty minutes to pull away my freezer suit. It smells of trapped sweat and fear.

‘Why don’t you see the doctor, Finny?’

Max’s concern is clear over the phone.

‘I can’t. I wasn’t supposed to be there. And I don’t want the rest of them to think I can’t do it. I don’t want the doctor to ground me because that’s what she’ll do and then I’ll miss Antarctica.’

And then he quietly tells me Pamela has cancelled his chopper flight. She’s told him she can’t spare the machine and he’ll just have to wait. I tell him it’s probably because Blanca’s started laughing again and then I start crying with it all.

I put the question to Chilli the cook: what’s it like going without sex for so long?

‘You get used to it.’

I look sceptical.

‘You do, Fin. It’s different to Australia. You’re not tempted by the opposite sex near as much. You’re just down here with all your friends and that sort of thing doesn’t enter your mind as much as it would at home. It’s not like a Friday night where you go out and say “ooh that’d be nice”. Here it’s more like brother and sister.’

‘But is it hard?’

‘Shit, yeah. Going without sex for eighteen months is reasonably difficult, yeah. It’s all a matter of not going crazy.’

The two of us are standing side by side in the kitchen, chopping fresh basil for pesto sauce. Plastic flies are stuck on the wall above us. Chilli asks me to go outside and get some lettuce for the salad.

I put on my freezer suit and walk to the hydroponics shed. Inside, trays of lush green are fed by plastic pipes and fish tank lights. Inside, I’m hit by the smell of green and wet. It’s a living clammy sensuous smell and it’s incredibly alien after the crisp blue Antarctic air. I walk past trays of cherry tomatoes and basil and parsley to the lettuce at the back. They have to be carried to the kitchen in an esky because their thin leaves will snap-freeze in the cold. Dip’s told me they used to grow flowers on the station. He says fancy new environmental guidelines put a stop to it. Now the only plants that can be grown are those that are going to be consumed.

‘We did toy with the idea of putting flower petals in the salads, but the guys thought it was just too poofy.’