The Scornful Ensemble

BY FRANCIS CROT

Lottie moisturised. Lottie toned. Lemon watched from his side. Tomorrow he would take his life. The notion was in him. He’d had difficulty making himself understood. If he’d known of the philosophical concept “zombie,” he might not have felt or “felt” the frustration which would intensify during that sleepless night and sublimate climactically in his suicide in the field the next day. He could have referred Lottie to the literature. In fact not knowing that particular philosophical term is probably what killed him. They had the downstairs of a sunny and pretty semi-detatched, very clean save for many sudden ladybirds, and a single virtuous-looking little mouse towards whom no policy had ever been quite agreed.

Lemon’s suicide would be its own elaborate suicide note: a linguistic treat which he hoped or “hoped” might – through its unorthodox emotional and legal significance – break into ordinarily inaccessible realms of propositional significance. The message was: lacking all subjectivity, Lemon’s life could be justly made the instrument of any value-generating discourse . . . his death could be used to win a five-a-side football game, or an anecdote game, and everyone should flock cheerily to pubs as if nothing had happened because nearly nothing had. His corpse lifted into a skip. That was the shifty and subtle point he would try to put across by trying to kill himself in that way. Lemon adjusted his pillow long-ways, the way he liked or “liked” it. On Lottie’s Facebook profile, he thought with regret or “thought with regret” it said: “About me: people like me cuz I’m cool as the other side of the pillow...”