PTSD Patrick and the Final Flashback
Panania was never meant to be a battlefield, but try telling that to PTSD Patrick.
He lived in a brick veneer shoebox just off Lambeth Street, right next to the Shell servo and across from a row of houses so identical they looked like they’d been birthed from a giant suburban photocopier. His place smelled like wet ashtrays and Dettol, and he’d covered the windows with the same jungle camo tarp he’d used to wrap up the bodies back in ‘Nam—at least, that’s what he claimed.
Patrick had been 19 when he got shipped out. Came back at 21 with a thousand-yard stare and a souvenir: the sort of guilt that burrows behind your eyes and starts nesting. Forty-odd years later and he still twitched at the sound of helicopters. Thought the Woolies delivery drone was a CIA recon op last Christmas and shot it clean out the sky with a flare gun.
He drank like the war never ended. VB in the morning, Bundy by lunch, petrol station Shiraz if he ran out of cash. His liver looked like it had been through three different car crashes and a minor house fire. Every now and then, he'd sit on his milk crate in the backyard, smoking rollies and telling pigeons about the time Charlie booby-trapped a latrine with a bouncing betty.
Then came the bingo night.
It was at the Panania Diggers Club. They let him in because someone felt sorry for him and he’d promised not to bring any weapons this time.
Patrick was halfway through a rum and Coke (no Coke) when Margaret-from-reception shouted it.
“CHARLIE’S WON THE MEAT RAFFLE!”
Time froze. Something in him snapped, like a tripwire tied to a rotting ankle bone. His eyes went wide, the colour of stormwater. He stood, slowly, knocking over his plastic chair. He reached into his fake Bunnings esky—because of course he smuggled it in—and pulled out his beloved Chinese SKS rifle, the one with a dodgy bayonet and duct tape where the trigger guard used to be.
The room screamed. Old ladies hit the floor like sacks of potatoes. Bingo cards flew like confetti.
Patrick, shouting incoherently about the Mekong Delta and betrayal, unloaded the first round into the ceiling, taking out a ceiling fan and half a fluorescent light. Barry, the club treasurer, copped some shrapnel in the ear and went down clutching his Club Keno ticket.
Margaret, bless her, tried to talk him down. But he was in full tunnel-vision mode. Wading through the bingo hall like it was the Cu Chi Tunnels.
By the time the cops showed up, Patrick had barricaded himself in the men’s toilet with a crate of expired sausage rolls and was using a toilet brush as a makeshift bayonet.
He didn’t get shot. They tasered him, twice, and he shat himself and passed out facedown in the urinal.
But that’s not how he died.
No. That came six months later.
He was out of prison, diagnosed, medicated, and sober for exactly nine days. He was on Centrelink, living in a halfway house in Bankstown. Things were… not good, but not disastrous.
Then one day he saw a cat.
A tabby.
It was crossing the street outside Aldi. Looked just like one he’d seen in Saigon the day before the Tet Offensive. Triggered something buried deep, something curled and waiting.
He chased it.
Full pelt. In thongs.
The cat darted through a fence. Patrick followed.
What he didn’t see was the Woolworths delivery truck reversing into the loading dock.
There was a sickening crunch, a brief burst of jungle bird sounds from his mouth, and then silence.
They found him half-covered in shredded lettuce.
No hero's funeral.
Just a brief write-up in the Canterbury-Bankstown Express: "Local Man Dies In Freak Cat-Chase Incident."
PTSD Patrick. Dead at 72.
Killed by trauma. But really... by a cat.