Soft serve, p.12
Soft Serve, page 12
She goes down the steps as fast as she can, back through the restaurant and out the side door. The light from her torch bounces around, unfocused. She grunts and huffs as she picks up the hose coiled neatly by the tap in the carpark and loops it around her arm. She runs back in and through to the playground. She attaches the hose to the tap in the corner (put there to clean vomit off the astroturf) and turns it on. She climbs the stairs again, holding the end of the hose as it sprays water indiscriminately. Fires start to grow out of the gutters, sweeping horizontally along, collecting each other, gaining power. The smell of eucalyptus has now melted into the heavy stench of burning plastic. She glances down and sees the bins in the carpark, full of vegetation, ablaze. She silently berates herself.
Pat starts to feel dizzy, and a strange thing happens: the dizzier she gets, the more she starts to think clearly, and she sees a dark expanding opportunity. She thinks again of those competing urges: preservation and destruction. Preserve what? Herself? The letter burning through her pocket? She realises she has the urge to protect this place: if she can do that, she will take a link out of the chain, provide a gap, a breath, in the destruction that is heading towards the town. But not only that. This place holds her grief in its hands – it is Taz’s active, living shrine. Somehow, in this moment, this place feels far more valuable, more alive, than a tombstone sitting rigid above some thirsty lilies. This is where she has thought about him most – every Diet Coke, every soft serve, every shift filled with hours of painful, stretchy thoughts of what could have been. It’s where his friends gather to remember him. It was their place. She can’t bear for all of that to be destroyed. The thought is suffocating. She starts to cough.
The energy of the building shifts as her hose pisses impotently on the roof. The embers have got inside; she can sense it. Through a gap somewhere? Through the aircon vents? Maybe she left the door open? It doesn’t matter. The embers are homing missiles seeking tinder, and they’ll find a way. All the napkins, the burger wrappers, the paper cups, the rolls of spare toilet paper, guiding the embers, ferrying them to the grease, the motherlode. She hears the smoke alarms and the wet chemical system spraying its foam all over the kitchen. But it can only reach so far. The threat is from above, in the roof itself.
The smoke, the heat, the melting plastic – all of it becomes overwhelming, and her mind untethers from her body even further. She starts to yell. Guttural, non-human yelps from deep within. She doesn’t know if she’s imploring something to stay back or to come closer. She stands, only just, the hose now useless, having melted through. She growls and howls, uglily, with all the futility of a staffy barking into a storm. Shoulders back, chest out, roaring away in the wrong language. I’ll go with it, she thinks as the smoke stuffs its black chemicals into her body. I’ll get carried away and finally, finally get to close my eyes and see. A victimless thought, she tries to convince herself: there’s nobody waiting at home, after all.
Everything spins and lurches. She thinks of the rocking chair, passed down through the family, where she would nurse Taz and drift off, lulled into a warm flannelette sleep by the regularity of his tiny pulse against hers and the smell of his apple shampoo.
She sees two ibises overhead, flying up and away towards the mountains, urgent but in control. Flap, flap, glide. Flap, flap, glide. Carried by a calm animal instinct, unbusied by human thought. She sees them through her now-closed eyes. She’s in otherworldly, excruciating pain. She thinks she is holding her phone up, torch on, like a beacon. Here, mate. I’m here, come find me, she tries to howl. Her eyes, her lungs, her entire being filling with smoke. The ibises disappear over the mountains and into the black, and Pat’s thoughts are overcome, pushed down into nothing and then, ever so slightly, bent upwards like molten steel, with a final push of effort, into some sort of meeting. Somewhere. Maybe.
Wake
Pat’s funeral will be delayed. The town’s processes have been disrupted while it navigates the aftermath of the fires. It will struggle to come to terms with the haphazardness of the destruction – a house burnt to the ground but its neighbour unaffected; the church, school and Maccas all razed, but The Fox still standing. Six souls lost, all told.
With no foreseeable date for Pat’s funeral, Jacob will organise a memorial to be held at The Fox two weeks after her death. Out in the beer garden. The smell of jasmine will mingle with the sausage sizzle under the shadecloth in the corner – Lotte will be on the tongs.
Jacob will wear his smart shirt and pants. He will walk out into the garden, with his black boots crunching on the concrete. He will cradle three beers in his hands and put one in front of Angie, one in front of Tony and one in front of himself. Jacob will be able to tell that Tony has already bought Angie a G & T. It’s in her eyes. Tony will tell Jacob to come to the next training induction day, that the RFS don’t care that he didn’t finish school, and Jacob will nod along. Maybe he’ll attend. Angie will hook her arm around Jacob’s – her new hero – and Jacob will stub out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table and think of Pat. How about you look at the last twenty-two years as the world’s longest ciggie break and get to work, hey? It might just be the most generous thing anyone has ever said to him.
Ethan will sit with Art, who will talk about the last week. Exhausted but proud. Ethan will stare into his beer and steal the occasional glance at Jacob, who won’t notice. Something has snapped.
How often is there resolution in life? Once? Twice, if someone’s really looking for it? The rest is just one long suspension. Life isn’t folded laundry; it’s the clothes chucked into the washing basket waiting to be cleaned.
Fern will sit sipping house sauvignon blanc, comfortably talking to Yusuke and his wife and their two sons.
People will make short, shaky speeches, MCed by Mark and Sylvie with a churchy distance that makes it feel official. Work, duty, service, motherhood, sense of humour, mateship, loss – the day becoming so much bigger than Pat. She would have loved that.
Jacob will get the guy behind the bar to turn up the music. He will move around the garden, taking everyone by the hand and getting them up to dance, slowly, arms rising but feet rooted to the ground, like the jasmine creepers along the wooden walls around them. A warm day-drink glow under the coloured festoon lights, weak against the sunshine.
The town, having come together, will breathe out.
Fern will need to go for a drive to clear her head. She’ll take her chance to sneak Jacob’s keys from his bumbag, which is slung over the back of his chair. She’ll kiss Angie on the forehead, but Angie will barely notice. Fern will walk out onto the street. The car will choke to life and she won’t notice the petrol light is on, the tiny orange bowser trying to warn her.
She will drive past gaps where houses used to be, like teeth knocked out of a mouth. She will drive onto the highway, turn her head to see the hollow black Maccas with a few beams jutting into the sky, and then speed off past the car dealerships on the edge of town, past the paddocks, further and further. Maybe she’ll drive to Sydney, she’ll think. But then the thought will pass.
Window down. Shadows of birds shooting around on the patches of grass that are brown and not black. Her hair flapping messily around.
Two kilometres out of town, the car will rattle and huff to an obstinate stop, just as she manages to steer it to the side of the road. Panic will rise. She will get out, her squinting eyes turning from one blank stretch of road to the other. Her breath will catch in her throat. She will think of Pat and those trees that grow green bits after the fire, and she will walk, her dry mouth tasting of white wine, towards the petrol station in town.
On the very outskirts of town, she will see a sign – For Sale – dug into the dusty ground.
She will stop to look at the house. Half as nice as anything she’s seen advertised online in Booralie. Fibro and lattice. Peeling paint. A window boarded up and weeds growing out of the driveway. It needs a coat of paint, she’ll think, but that’s achievable. She likes the smell of fresh paint.
Her mind will flick back to the coffee machine, hulking and yellow, with its threatening and indecipherable buttons. And then to Yusuke. Delicious, he had said.
She will breathe in and out and clap her hands together as if to say: And now, action.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my wonderful family: Mary and Bryan Pennington, Alice and Mike Lans, Isobel and James Robinson, Max, Violet, Charlie, Andie, Will, Sam and Albie for their never-ending love and support. To my partner, Nataniel Kraizelburd, for his heart, intellect and patience, as well as everything else.
I could not be more grateful to the entire UQP team. To Aviva Tuffield for taking a risk and for being a wise and delightful shepherd, to Ian See for his whip-smart astounding brain, and to Sarah Valle, Erin Sandiford, Jean Smith and Kate Donaldson-Lloyd. Thank you to Josh Durham for the beautiful cover. A boy couldn’t ask for a better team to guide him through his debut. And thank you to Jordan Prosser for your faith in me.
Thank you to everyone who trudged through early, messy drafts – Penny Greenhalgh, Katrina Sanders, Darcy Brown, James Haxby, Hayden Tonazzi, Tommy Murphy, Jo Hopperton, Tim McGarry, Kaylee Hazell, and the incomparable Jane FitzGerald.
Thank you to Yoko Miki-Feeney, Ryo Harada, Jay Laga’aia and Anatonio Te Maioha for your openness and generosity, and to Lauren Field and Nicholas Medianik and the brave men and women of the Rural Fire Service who consistently put their lives on the line every summer.
Thank you to Natalie Stewart and the wonderful team at HLA.
Thank you to the Faber Academy and the fabulous group of writers with whom I was lucky enough to work. Their positivity, creativity and support helped generate the first draft of this book, along with the expert guidance of Eleanor Limprecht and Fiona Kelly McGregor.
Thank you to Heather Mitchell, Benjamin Law, Hugh Mackay and Favel Parrett for being so kind.
Thanks to ATYP and all my excellent colleagues.
And heartfelt thanks to my beautiful friends (you know who you are) for your kindness, cheerleading, generosity and humour. What’s life without friends.
First published 2026 by University of Queensland Press
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Copyright © George Kemp 2026
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No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing or editing of this work. Without in any way limiting the author’s and UQP’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to ‘train’ AI technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
Cover design by Josh Durham, Design by Committee
Cover images: receipt, lamppost and ibis by Josh Durham; background by Eugene von Guerard, Bush fire between Mount Elephant and Timboon, 1857.
Author photograph by Luke Stambouliah
Typeset in 12/17 pt Bembo Std by University of Queensland Press
University of Queensland Press is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
ISBN 978 0 7022 6913 4 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 7077 2 (epdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 7078 9 (epub)
George Kemp, Soft Serve
