I turn to Max and hold him in the frame of my camera. It hides the sudden tears. The warm flesh of my cheek sticks to the cold metal of the camera. Quickly, I pull my skin away. I was trying to get a closeup of his eyelashes dusted with ice. It looks like white mascara.

I don’t want to leave this place.

Max walks me to the gangplank. He slips into my hand a small round stone, pure white and as smooth and rounded and beautiful as a miniature Brancusi.

We hug. We don’t kiss.

Ten: Coming Clean

TEN

COMING CLEAN

After a long silence the ship’s engines roar at the ice. Nothing happens. The ship’s very still in its tight embrace of white. The engines sound immensely frustrated. They strain and stop and then roar, insistently, again. There’s no movement. For an hour, there’s no movement. We’re stuck! Oh joy! Another day, maybe a week! I raise my thumb, quietly and conspiratorially, to Max on the ice. Then there’s a sudden soft slide back. The hull’s free. Damn it. The horn blares triumphantly. I’ve never liked that horn. The ship reverses slowly and Max’s waving arm diminishes and he walks away and I’ve lost him and the ship cuts back deep into virgin ice and turns and slips away along an alley of icebergs. They shine vividly in the sun.

In an hour the continent’s gone. There’s just ice, and icebergs, and a very big sky.

I go below to small spaces. In the background is the continual hum of the engines. I can’t find silence and the air smells plastic and wrong.

The cabin seems incomplete without Blanca and Andrea bursting into the bathroom and stepping over my legs and flopping down beside me. I longed to be alone when they were loud all around me, and now I long for their company. Everything’s too neat and bare. I spill lots of mess from my bags; I rubble the antiseptic length of Blanca’s empty couch.

I’m in my bed. The air trapped in the sheets is sour with fart. I hold in my hand the small, white rock. I want to cry with the leaving of it all.

The voyage home’s a lot quicker. We’re heading into summer so there’s less ice and we’re not stopping to catch seals and we’re not making diversions to Mawson Station and Macquarie Island.

On the way back there are only twelve expeditioners. The ship is built for a hundred and the interior pockets us away in small places. The bridge and the rec room are spare and the bar is near silent. It’s lonesome and quiet and sad.

I’m deeply tired. Big Eye is gone. I want to dive into sleep.