Stewart Liam Butridge had had enough.

Stewart Liam Butridge had had enough.

‘I’ve had enough!’ he said, and the only person who ever listened to anything he ever said ever replied;

‘Yes I have.’

‘I’m going to end it all. Kill myself. Stop living.’ He went on, ‘and I’m going to do it today.’

Stewart had had a short, by comparison, life, and it had been a life filled, he felt, with embarrassment, discomfort, shame, humiliation and disappointment.

Everything he had ever wanted to do, he had not been able to. Everything he had ever managed to do had been awful. And worse, the people he tried to call friends treated him like a personal assistant.

‘Stewie, baby’ Kirsty would say, ‘Be a doll and run to the shop to get me an icecream.’

‘But, I’m busy mopping your floor and looking after your younger brother. Also I spent all my money on your lunch.’

But did she listen? Of course not. They never did. Any of them.

Take sarah, for example.

Sarah constantly complained to Stewart about her hard life, her stern parents and anything else she could think of to complain about. But when Stewart tried to say things like ‘I’m sure you’ll be able to survive with an A- on your test and only a million dollars to spend this month,’ she would simply act as though no one had said anything and indeed, no one was even in the room with her.

Or worse, she’d play her mean little game where she said ‘What was that? I thought I heard something. Must have been the wind!’

That game really got old fast, as far as Stewart was concerned.

No, it was time to end it all. No doubt about it.

The only question was,

‘How?’

Stewart stared at his pimply reflection in the mirror and he thought about it.

He pictured a knife slicing through his wrist, but the image in his head was so graphic he knew he couldn’t bring himself to actually do it.

He thought about hanging himself from the ceiling fan, but then he remembered how easily that had ripped out of the ceiling last time he had tried to swing from the blades like a monkey.

That would never work.

‘If I had a car, I could sit inside it while it’s running and let the fumes suffocate me. That’d be easy!’ he exclaimed, and got temporarily excited while he thought of it, before remembering he didn’t have a car, and then he felt disappointed again.

‘Typical’ he spat, bitterly.

He thought of using his scooter to do the same thing but, he figured, it would probably take too long and he’d get bored before it was over.

Jumping off a cliff?

Too painful.

Shooting myself?

Probably miss.

Being hit by a truck?

Too scary.

‘wait a minute!’ he yelled to himself. ‘Why am I scared of being hit by a truck when I want to get killed? What am I afraid of, that it won’t kill me?’

Then he thought about the possibility that it wouldn’t kill him, merely put him in hospital for years and years.

‘We’ll give that one a miss, too…’ he muttered.

‘There has simply got to be a way! It just cannot be this hard!’

And then it struck him, like a truck striking a pedestrian, only without the bone crushing or the falling over or the serious injury or the truck. But with a pedestrian. Well, not technically a pedestrian but certainly he had been a pedestrian before.

Ok so not so much like the truck.

But nonetheless, the idea came to him in such a snap that he literally jerked upright from the thought of it.

‘my scooter! People get killed on scooters all the time! It’ll be easy to find some moron to knock me off my scooter and kill me! I’ll get my scooter!’

So, with this idea fresh in his mind, he ran to the shed to get his scooter before he forgot his ingenious plan.

He unlocked the shed and, as he always did, carefully checked behind the door for spiders. He picked up his helmet and fastidiously clasped the buckle.

He checked the tyre pressure was ok in both tyres, and then he wheeled himself out to the driveway, stopping twice, to make certain the shed was locked after him and that the back door was locked too.

‘After all’ he told himself, ‘no good mum coming home to a dead son AND a burgled house!’

And then he was off!

Riding like he fully intended to kill himself, he tore up the street at a suicidal 13 miles an hour and, only pausing for a moment to give way to oncoming traffic, he hurled himself towards Rarnaby Hill.

Rarnaby Hill is the windiest, steepest, narrowest road in Frangborough, where Stewart lived. People are forever knocking cyclists over the edge, colliding with oncoming traffic and any number of other accidents on Rarnaby Hill. So Stewart knew he was certain to get himself killed.

With the throttle on full bore, Stewart tore up the hill, tyres squealing from the speed, he blurred his way towards the top.

Stewart’s plan, at this stage, was to make it to the top and then career down without brakes, but he had to admit to himself that he half expected to be hit on the way up. A little disappointed, he made it to the top without encountering a single other motorist, and only one old lady who was walking her dog.

‘Not much chance of not surviving there’ he sulked, and then he was at the top.

Once he was actually there, it was actually much scarier than he had thought it would be.

‘I always forget how high it looks from up here. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go into the city and see if the traffic is really bad in there.’

With that, he carefully set off back down the hill, making sure to only use the brakes in stints and to watch for oncoming traffic.

‘Wouldn’t do to get killed on my way to killing myself.’ He reassured himself.

He wasn’t wimping out. No way.

So he carefully and methodically made his way into the city.

Traffic was terrible! There were cars everywhere. Lines and lines of cars, buses and trucks and trams and motorcycles all at a complete standstill, waiting for a green light which never seemed to be coming.

‘How am I going to get killed in traffic that is moving this slowly?’ Stewart fumed inside his white with fluorescent yellow stripes helmet. He had put the stripes on himself. ‘All the better to see me with!’ he had joked with himself.

‘I am very funny!’ he had replied, thinking how clever he was for comparing himself to Little Red Riding Hood.

But all of that was a time distant, with a different Stewart.

Today’s Stewart was thinking only about one thing.

Well, one thing other than getting out of the traffic jam he had put himself in.

And that one thing was death.

His scooter crawled its way towards a side street, and with a sigh of relief he turned out of the traffic, straight into more traffic.

‘Oh god I’m NEVER going to die at this rate!’

He was really very annoyed at this stage.

‘But wait!’

Stewart had a habit of thinking out loud.

‘The sidewalk! I can ride on the sidewalk! Someone will probably back out of their driveway and squash me!’

Assuring himself this was a brilliant plan, he wheeled his way up onto the sidewalk, and then he let her rip!

He flew past the line of cars and laughed at his own cleverness and their foolishness. Oh, it wouldn’t be any good at all to be somebody that wasn’t him right now! No siree.

But he made it to the end of the street and not one car backed out in front of him.

As if rubbing his nose in his inability to crash, an elderly gentleman in a four wheel drive stopped well short of the give way sign and waved him across.

‘Thanks for nothing!’ Stewart snapped. ‘I can do it. You’ll see!’

The old man smiled and nodded knowingly while giving Stewart a happy wave.

‘You’ll never do it, you coward!’ he seemed to be saying.

Stewart flipped the old man the bird, and took a slight satisfaction from the shocked look that jumped across the old man’s face.

Then he felt bad. He wanted to go back and apologise to the old man, but the traffic had finally started to move away and there was really no chance for him to do so. He would simply have to live with the guilt.

By this time, the sun was low in the sky, and Stewart was feeling very tired.

‘I’ll kill myself tomorrow’ he said. ‘Right now, I just want to go home.’

So he turned himself around and made his way, slowly and carefully, home.

‘There’ll be plenty of time for suicide tomorrow.’ He thought to himself.

But wait, tomorrow is a school day!

‘Ok.’ He said out loud to no one in particular. ‘I’ll wait ‘til Saturday.’