The ship has been transformed into a floating garbage truck. Its belly and cargo decks are filled with a year’s accumulation of rubbish from Davis Station. Anything that can’t be incinerated is coming back with us.

And the ship carries back Shen, the suicidal Chinese man, and a handful of winterers who are coming back early. We make a motley crew. The winterers are from several stations. They’ve been RTA’d—Returned To Australia—for various reasons.

‘None of them good,’ says Simeon, my gossip king in the bowels of the ship. ‘They’re like damaged goods, being returned because of fights on their station or marriage bustups back home, that kind of thing. And some people just hate it. They have to get away from it, all that white. They go stir-crazy.’

I want to interview some of the winterers but they stay in the shadows of the ship. I don’t see them much at first; they’re quiet and they don’t seek out company. They’re focused on home.

Helen gently parts my thighs and with sure hands presses the muscles around my groin. I’m naked from the waist down. She says my injury’s been caused by the freezer suit crotch that came down to my knees.

‘It was all the strain of your body pushing against the layers of fabric when you were walking.’

‘I reckon they gave me that freezer suit deliberately, Helen. Cripple the journo! Stop her from getting out!’

We laugh. My stomach flutters as Helen’s fingers press on my inner thigh. I’m starting to get turned on. I think of Max. Taking his earlobe in my lips, sucking on the softness and my tongue playful with his loop of gold. Wrapping my body around the foetal curve of his back, my hand threaded under his arm and across his chest and the sweet softness of flesh to flesh.

My bashed-at body is eased onto the mattress. It’s bruised and blistered and the ache runs deep, like an underground river, along the length of my arms and legs. In the long stretches of being alone I assess the battering of Antarctica: wind-scoured face, sunburnt nose, dry flaking skin, torn nails, bruised knees, lines of blisters on the bottom of my feet and two huge blisters like twin pompoms on the end of each big toe. I slice through thick skin with nail scissors and warm fluid spills across my fingers. Now there’s no-one in my cabin, all my disgusting habits are coming out.