How to get Away with Suicide by Jackie Kay

It wasn't going to be easy. For one thing, too much was known about Malcolm. He wasn't one of those sad cases that had no friends. By the time he was forty-five, he'd gathered arguably too many friends. They knew, for instance, that Malcolm was a very good driver and there was no way in the creation that he'd end up with his metal wrapped around a lamp-post, or with his bonnet stuck in the birch tree at the end of his old street, or his car up-ended on the central reservation of the M8 to Edinburgh. 'Reserve your judgements on that one,' he could imagine his pals saying, softly, 'cos Malkie wis an excellent driver. All right - one drink driving offence, but Malkie never knocked down anything. No no no no. Something's fishy; we're talking suicide here.'

The thing was, Malcolm badly wanted to kill himself: he wanted the noise to stop; he wanted the silence that pads across a loch on a wintry, misty morning with its webbed feet. No more demands, Malcolm wanted not to have to tell himself all the ways in which he hadn't really done what he thought he might do with his life. But he didn't want anybody knowing he'd killed himself. Just because he wanted to die didn't mean he'd lost his pride. That might be a contradiction for some people to think about; and some people might think that if you got that desperate you really wouldn't care what people thought. You would actually be beyond it. Well, Malcolm wasn't beyond it. He respected the living. Face it: suicide's a bum deal. He didn't want his mates feeling bad for years, thinking, Right enough, he didn't sound himself. Should have taken him for a pint. Or should have this, or should have that. He didn't even want his ex-wife to feel rotten, despite the not insignificant fact that she was the one that dumped him, took his kids and got a big stupid eedyit to prance around and pretend to be their father. Try that out. If somebody's pretending to be you, Malcolm thought, then who are you? Would it be noticed really, in a significant, life changing way? He doubted it. He had loved his wife once. He was categorically not interested in revenging her for betraying him. Malcolm would actually be the first to acknowledge that he had been a miserable bastard for years. Katie was entitled to her wee portion of happiness. 'Do you mean that, Malkie?' 'Naw; aye. I wanted to be dead, very dead indeed, more dead than a dodo.' Thinking about death was a non-stop conversation in Malcolm's head. He played the parts, as if a jury were involved. For him acquittal was being allowed to quit to make a rapid exit, to say, Ta ta, I'm away. Will ye no come back again? No frankly.