A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (UK Version)

by  ANTHONY BURGESS

Contents

Introduction (A Clockwork Orange Resucked)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Glossary of Nadsat Language

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and was a graduate of the University there.  After six years in the Army he worked as an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education, as a lecturer in Phonetics and as a grammar school master.  From 1954 till 1960 he was an education officer in the Colonial Service, stationed in Malaya and Brunei.  He has been called one of the very few literary geniuses of our time.  Certainly he borrowed from no other literary source than himself.  That source produced thirty-two novels, a volume of verse, two plays, and sixteen works of nonfiction-together with countless music compositions, including symphonies, operas, and jazz.  His most recent work was A Mouthful of Air: Language, Languages...Especially English.  Anthony Burgess died in 1993.

Introduction

A Clockwork Orange Resucked

I first published the novella A Clockwork Orange in 1962, which ought to be far enough in the past for it to be erased from the world's literary memory.  It refuses to be erased, however, and for this the film version of the book made by Stanley Kubrick may be held chiefly responsible.  I should myself be glad to disown it for various reasons, but this is not permitted.  I receive mail from students who try to write theses about it or requests from Japanese dramaturges to turn

It into a sort of Noh play.  It seems likely to survive, while other works of mine that I value more bite the dust. This is not an unusual experience for an artist.  Rachmaninoff used to groan because he was known mainly for a Prelude in C Sharp Minor which he wrote as a boy, while the works of his maturity never got into the programmes.  Kids cut their pianistic teeth on a Minuet in G which Beethoven composed only so that he could detest it.  I have to go on living with A Clockwork Orange, and this means I have a sort of authorial duty to it.  I have a very special duty to it in the United States, and I had better now explain what this duty is.

 Let me put the situation baldly.  A Clockwork Orange has never been published entire in America.  The book I wrote is divided into three sections of seven chapters each.  Take out your pocket calculator and you will find that these add up to a total of twenty-one chapters.  21 is the symbol for human maturity, or used to be, since at 21 you got the vote and assumed adult responsibility.  Whatever its symbology, the number 21 was the number I started out with. Novelists of my stamp are interested in what is called arithmology, meaning that number has to mean something in human terms when they handle it.  The number of chapters is never entirely arbitrary.  Just as a musical composer starts off with a vague image of bulk and duration, so a novelist begins with an image of length, and this image is expressed in the number of sections and the number of chapters in which the work will be disposed.  Those twenty-one chapters were important to me.

 But they were not important to my New York publisher.  The book he brought out had only twenty chapters.  He insisted on cutting out the twenty-first.  I could, of course, have demurred at this and taken my book elsewhere, but it was considered that he was being charitable in accepting the work at all, and that all other New York, or Boston, pub-lishers would kick out the manuscript on its dog-ear.  I needed money

back in 1961, even the pittance I was being offered as an advance, and

if the condition of the book's acceptance was also its truncation-well,

so be it.  So there is a profound difference between A Clockwork Orange

as Great Britain knows it and the somewhat slimmer volume that bears the same name in the United States of America.

 Let us go further.  The rest of the world was sold the book out of

Great Britain, and so most versions-certainly the French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Hebrew, Rumanian, and German translations-have the original twenty-one chapters.  Now when Stanley Kubrick made his film-though he made it in England-he followed the American version and, so it seemed to his audiences outside America, ended the story somewhat prematurely. Audiences did not exactly clamour for their money back, but they wondered why Kubrick left out the dénouement.  People wrote to me about this-indeed much of my later life has been expended on Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustrations of intention-while both Kubrick and my New York publisher coolly bask in the rewards of their misdemeanor. Life is of course, terrible.

 What happens in that twenty-first chapter?  You now have the chance to

find out.  Briefly, my young thuggish protagonist grows up.  He grows bored with violence and recognizes that human energy is better expended on creation than destruction.  Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.  Its dynamism has to find an outlet in smashing telephone kiosks, derailing trains, stealing cars and smashing them and, of course, in the much more satisfactory activity of destroying human beings.  There comes a time, however, when violence is seen as juvenile and boring.  It is the repartee of the stupid and ignorant.  My young hoodlum comes to the revelation of the need to get something done in life-to marry, to beget children, to keep the orange of the world turning in the

Rookers of Bog, or hands of God, and perhaps even create something-music, say. After all, Mozart and Mendelssohn were composing deathless music in their teens or nadsats, and all my hero was doing was razrezzing and giving the old in-out.  It is with a kind of shame that this growing youth looks back on his devastating past.  He wants a different kind of future.

 There is no hint of this change of intention in the twentieth chapter.  The boy is conditioned, then deconditioned, and he foresees with glee a resumption of the operation of free and violent will.  'I was cured all right,' he says, and so the American book ends.  So the film ends too. The twenty-first chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change.  Their is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.  Even trashy best-sellers show people changing.  When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel.

 But my New York publisher believed that my twenty-first chapter was a sellout. It was veddy veddy British, don't you know.  It was bland and it showed a Pelagian unwillingness to accept that a human being could be a model for unregenerable evil.  The Americans, he said in effect, were tougher than the British and could face up to reality.  Soon they would be facing up to it in Vietnam.  My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better.  Such a book would be sensational, and so it is.  But I do not think it is a fair picture of human life.

 I do not think so because, by definition, a human being is endowed with free will.  He can use this to choose between good and evil.  If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange-meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State.  It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.  The important thing is moral choice.  Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.  Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.  This is what the television news is about.  Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive.  To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.  We like to have the pants scared off us by visions of cosmic destruction.  To sit down in a dull room and compose the Missa solennis or The Anatomy of Melancholy does not make headlines or news flashes.  Unfortunately my little squib of a book was found attractive to many because it was as odorous as a crateful of bad eggs with the miasma of original sin.

 It seems priggish or Pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers.  My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy.  It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.  But the book does also have a moral lesson, and it is the weary traditional one of the fundamental importance of moral choice.  It is because this lesson sticks out like a sore thumb that I tend to disparage A Clockwork Orange as a work too didactic to be artistic.  It is not the novelist’s job to preach; it is his duty to show.  I have shown enough, though the curtain of an invented lingo gets in the way-another aspect of my cowardice.  Nadsat, a Russified version of English, was meant to muffle the raw response we expect from pornography.  It turns the book into a linguistic adventure.  People preferred the film because they are scared, rightly, of language.

 I don’t think I have to remind readers what the title means.  Clockwork oranges don’t exist, except in the speech of old Londoners.  The image was a bizarre one, always used for a bizarre thing.  “He’s as queer as a clockwork orange,” meant he was queer to the limit of queerness.  It did not primarily denote homosexuality, though a queer, before restrictive legislation came in, was a term used for a member of the inverted fraternity.  Europeans who translated the title as Arancia a Orologeria or Orange Mécanique could not understand its Cockney resonance and they assumed that it meant a hand grenade, a cheaper kind of explosive pineapple.  I mean it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness.

 Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb.  I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgement may have been faulty.  Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics. “Quod scripsi scripsi” said Pontius Pilate when he made Jesus Christ the King of the Jews.  “What I have written I have written.”  We can destroy what we have written but we cannot unwrite it.  I leave what I wrote with what Dr. Johnson called frigid indifference to the judgement of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such things.  Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out.  You are free.

Anthony Burgess

November, 1986

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (UK Version)

Part 1

1

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is

Pete, Georgie, and Dim.  Dim being really dim, and we sat in

the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do

with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

The Ko Part 1 rova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O

my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like,

things changing so skorry these days and everybody very

quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither.

Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else.  They

had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet

against prodding some of the new veshches which they used

to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vel-

locet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other vesh-

ches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen

minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in

your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg.  Or you

could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this

would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty

twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this even-

ing I'm starting off the story with.

Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need

from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to

tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his

blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor

to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired

ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till's guts.  But, as

they say, money isn't everything.

The four of us were dressed in the height of fashion,

which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with

the old jelly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crotch

underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of

a design you could viddy clear enough in a certain light, so

that I had one in the shape of a spider, Pete had a rooker (a

hand, that is), Georgie had a very fancy one of a flower, and

poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown's

litso (face, that is).  Dim not ever having much of an idea of

things and being, beyond all shadow of a doubting thomas,

the dimmest of we four.  Then we wore waisty jackets without

lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders ('pletchoes'

we called them) which were a kind of a mockery of having real

shoulders like that.  Then, my brothers, we had these off-white

cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud with a

sort of a design made on it with a fork.  We wore our hair not

too long and we had flip horrorshow boots for kicking.

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

There were three devotchkas sitting at the counter all

together, but there were four of us malchicks and it was

usually like one for all and all for one.  These sharps were

dressed in the heighth of fashion too, with purple and green

and orange wigs on their gullivers, each one not costing less

than three or four weeks of those sharps' wages, I should

reckon, and make-up to match (rainbows round the glazzies,

that is, and the rot painted very wide).  Then they had long

black very straight dresses, and on the groody part of them

they had little badges of like silver with different malchicks'

names on them - Joe and Mike and suchlike.  These were sup-

posed to be the names of the different malchicks they'd

spatted with before they were fourteen.  They kept looking

our way and I nearly felt like saying the three of us (out of the

corner of my rot, that is) should go off for a bit of pol and

leave poor old Dim behind, because it would be just a matter

of kupetting Dim a demi-litre of white but this time with a

dollop of synthemesc in it, but that wouldn't really have been

playing like the game.  Dim was very very ugly and like his

name, but he was a horrorshow filthy fighter and very handy

with the boot.

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

The chelloveck sitting next to me, there being this long big

plushy seat that ran round three walls, was well away with his

glazzies glazed and sort of burbling slovos like "Aristotle

wishy washy works outing cyclamen get forficulate smartish".

He was in the land all right, well away, in orbit, and I knew

what it was like, having tried it like everybody else had done,

but at this time I'd got to thinking it was a cowardly sort of a

veshch, O my brothers.  You'd lay there after you'd drunk the

old moloko and then you got the messel that everything all

round you was sort of in the past.  You could viddy it all right,

all of it, very clear - tables, the stereo, the lights, the sharps

and the malchicks - but it was like some veshch that used to

be there but was not there not no more.  And you were sort of

hypnotized by your boot or shoe or a finger-nail as it might

be, and at the same time you were sort of picked up by the old

scruff and shook like you might be a cat.  You got shook and

shook till there was nothing left.  You lost your name and

your body and your self and you just didn't care, and you

waited until your boot or finger-nail got yellow, then

yellower and yellower all the time.  Then the lights started

cracking like atomics and the boot or finger-nail or, as it

might be, a bit of dirt on your trouser-bottom turned into a

big big big mesto, bigger than the whole world, and you were

just going to get introduced to old Bog or God when it was

all over.  You came back to here and now whimpering sort of,

with your rot all squaring up for a boohoohoo.  Now that's

very nice but very cowardly.  You were not put on this earth

just to get in touch with God.  That sort of thing could sap all

the strength and the goodness out of a chelloveck.

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

The stereo was on and you got the idea that the singer's

goloss was moving from one part of the bar to another,

flying up to the ceiling and then swooping down again and

whizzing from wall to wall.  It was Berti Laski rasping a real

starry oldie called 'You Blister My Paint'.  One of the three

ptitsas at the counter, the one with the green wig, kept push-

ing her belly out and pulling it in in time to what they called

the music.  I could feel the knives in the old moloko starting

to prick, and now I was ready for a bit of twenty-to-one.  So I

yelped: "Out out out out!" like a doggie, and then I cracked

this veck who was sitting next to me and well away and

burbling a horrorshow crack on the ooko or earhole, but he

didn't feel it and went on with his "Telephonic hardware and

when the farfarculule gets rubadubdub".  He'd feel it all right

when he came to, out of the land.

"Where out?" said Georgie.

"Oh, just to keep walking," I said, "and viddy what turns up,

O my little brothers."

So we scatted out into the big winter nochy and walked

down Marghanita Boulevard and then turned into Boothby

Avenue, and there we found what we were pretty well looking

for, a malenky jest to start off the evening with.  There was a

doddery starry schoolmaster type veck, glasses on and his rot

open to the cold nochy air.  He had books under his arm and a

crappy umbrella and was coming round the corner from the

Public Biblio, which not many lewdies used these days.  You

never really saw many of the older bourgeois type out after

nightfall those days, what with the shortage of police and we

fine young malchickiwicks about, and this prof type chello-

veck was the only one walking in the whole of the street.  So

we goolied up to him, very polite, and I said: "Pardon me,

brother."

He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four

of us like that, coming up so quiet and polite and smiling, but

he said: "Yes?  What is it?" in a very loud teacher-type goloss,

as if he was trying to show us he wasn't poogly.  I said:

"I see you have books under your arm, brother.  It is indeed

a rare pleasure these days to come across somebody that still

reads, brother."

"Oh," he said, all shaky.  "Is it?  Oh, I see."  And he kept look-

ing from one to the other of we four, finding himself now like

in the middle of a very smiling and polite square.

"Yes," I said.  "It would interest me greatly, brother, if you

would kindly allow me to see what books those are that you

have under your arm.  I like nothing better in this world than a

good clean book, brother."

"Clean," he said.  "Clean, eh?"  And then Pete skvatted these

three books from him and handed them round real skorry.

Being three, we all had one each to viddy at except for Dim.

The one I had was called 'Elementary Crystallography', so I

opened it up and said: "Excellent, really first-class," keeping

turning the pages.  Then I said in a very shocked type goloss:

"But what is this here?  What is this filthy slovo?  I blush to

look at this word.  You disappoint me, brother, you do

really."

"But," he tried, "but, but."

"Now," said Georgie, "here is what I should call real dirt.

There's one slovo beginning with an f and another with a c."

He had a book called 'The Miracle of the Snowflake.'

"Oh," said poor old Dim, smotting over Pete's shoulder and

going too far, like he always did, "it says here what he done to

her, and there's a picture and all.  Why," he said, "you're

nothing but a filthy-minded old skitebird."

"An old man of your age, brother," I said, and I started to

rip up the book I'd got, and the others did the same with the

ones they had.  Dim and Pete doing a tug-of-war with 'The

Rhombohedral System'.  The starry prof type began to creech:

"But those are not mine, those are the property of the mu-

nicipality, this is sheer wantonness and vandal work," or some

such slovos.  And he tried to sort of wrest the books back off

of us, which was like pathetic.  "You deserve to be taught a

lesson, brother," I said, "that you do."  This crystal book I had

was very tough-bound and hard to razrez to bits, being real

starry and made in days when things were made to last like,

but I managed to rip the pages up and chuck them in handfuls

of like snowflakes, though big, all over this creeching old

veck, and then the others did the same with theirs, old Dim

just dancing about like the clown he was.  "There you are," said

Pete.  "There's the mackerel of the cornflake for you, you dirty

reader of filth and nastiness."

"You naughty old veck, you," I said, and then we began to

filly about with him.  Pete held his rookers and Georgie sort

of hooked his rot wide open for him and Dim yanked out his

false zoobies, upper and lower.  He threw these down on the

pavement and then I treated them to the old boot-crush,

though they were hard bastards like, being made of some new

horrorshow plastic stuff.  The old veck began to make sort of

chumbling shooms - "wuf waf wof" - so Georgie let go of

holding his goobers apart and just let him have one in the

toothless rot with his ringy fist, and that made the old veck

start moaning a lot then, then out comes the blood, my

brothers, real beautiful.  So all we did then was to pull his

outer platties off, stripping him down to his vest and long

underpants (very starry; Dim smecked his head off near), and

then Pete kicks him lovely in his pot, and we let him go.  He

went sort of staggering off, it not having been too hard of a

tolchock really, going "Oh oh oh", not knowing where or

what was what really, and we had a snigger at him and then

riffled through his pockets, Dim dancing round with his

crappy umbrella meanwhile, but there wasn't much in them.

There were a few starry letters, some of them dating right

back to 1960 with "My dearest dearest" in them and all that

chepooka, and a keyring and a starry leaky pen.  Old Dim gave

up his umbrella dance and of course had to start reading one

of the letters out loud, like to show the empty street he could

read.  "My darling one," he recited, in this very high type

goloss, "I shall be thinking of you while you are away and

hope you will remember to wrap up warm when you go out

at night."  Then he let out a very shoomny smeck - "Ho ho ho"

- pretending to start wiping his yahma with it.  "All right," I

said.  "Let it go, O my brothers."  In the trousers of this starry

veck there was only a malenky bit of cutter (money, that is) -

not more than three gollies - so we gave all his messy little

coin the scatter treatment, it being hen-korm to the amount

of pretty polly we had on us already.  Then we smashed the

umbrella and razrezzed his platties and gave them to the

blowing winds, my brothers, and then we'd finished with the

starry teacher type veck.  We hadn't done much, I know, but

that was only like the start of the evening and I make no appy

polly loggies to thee or thine for that.  The knives in the milk

plus were stabbing away nice and horrorshow now.

The next thing was to do the sammy act, which was one

way to unload some of our cutter so we'd have more of an

incentive like for some shop-crasting, as well as it being a way

of buying an alibi in advance, so we went into the Duke of

New York on Amis Avenue and sure enough in the snug there

were three or four old baboochkas peeting their black and

suds on SA (State Aid).  Now we were the very good mal-

chicks, smiling good evensong to one and all, though these

wrinkled old lighters started to get all shook, their veiny old

rookers all trembling round their glasses, and making the suds

spill on the table.  "Leave us be, lads," said one of them, her

face all mappy with being a thousand years old, "we're only

poor old women."  But we just made with the zoobies, flash

flash flash, sat down, rang the bell, and waited for the boy to

come.  When he came, all nervous and rubbing his rookers on

his grazzy apron, we ordered us four veterans - a veteran

being rum and cherry brandy mixed, which was popular just

then, some liking a dash of lime in it, that being the Canadian

variation.  Then I said to the boy:

"Give these poor old baboochkas over there a nourishing

something.  Large Scotchmen all round and something to take

away."  And I poured my pocket of deng all over the table, and

the other three did likewise, O my brothers.  So double

firegolds were bought in for the scared starry lighters, and

they knew not what to do or say.  One of them got out

"Thanks, lads," but you could see they thought there was

something dirty like coming.  Anyway, they were each given a

bottle of Yank General, cognac that is, to take away, and I

gave money for them to be delivered each a dozen of black

and suds that following morning, they to leave their stinking

old cheenas' addresses at the counter.  Then with the cutter

that was left over we did purchase, my brothers, all the meat

pies, pretzels, cheese-snacks, crisps and chocbars in that

mesto, and those too were for the old sharps.  Then we said:

"Back in a minoota," and the old ptitsas were still saying:

"Thanks, lads," and "God bless you, boys," and we were going

out without one cent of cutter in our carmans.

"Makes you feel real dobby, that does," said Pete.  You could

viddy that poor old Dim the dim didn't quite pony all that,

but he said nothing for fear of being called gloopy and a

domeless wonderboy.  Well, we went off now round the

corner to Attlee Avenue, and there was this sweets and cancers

shop still open.  We'd left them alone near three months now

and the whole district had been very quiet on the whole, so

the armed millicents or rozz patrols weren't round there

much, being more north of the river these days.  We put our

maskies on - new jobs these were, real horrorshow, wonder-

fully done really; they were like faces of historical per-

sonalities (they gave you the names when you bought) and I

had Disraeli, Pete had Elvis Presley, Georgie had Henry VIII

and poor old Dim had a poet veck called Peebee Shelley; they

were a real like disguise, hair and all, and they were some very

special plastic veshch so you could roll it up when you'd done

with it and hide it in your boot - then three of us went in.

Pete keeping chasso without, not that there was anything to

worry about out there.  As soon as we launched on the shop

we went for Slouse who ran it, a big portwine jelly of a veck

who viddied at once what was coming and made straight for

the inside where the telephone was and perhaps his well-oiled

pooshka, complete with six dirty rounds.  Dim was round that

counter skorry as a bird, sending packets of snoutie flying and

cracking over a big cut-out showing a sharp with all her

zoobies going flash at the customers and her groodies near

hanging out to advertise some new brand of cancers.  What

you could viddy then was a sort of a big ball rolling into the

inside of the shop behind the curtain, this being old Dim and

Slouse sort of locked in a death struggle.  Then you could

slooshy panting and snoring and kicking behind the curtain

and veshches falling over and swearing and then glass going

smash smash smash.  Mother Slouse, the wife, was sort of

froze behind the counter.  We could tell she would creech

murder given one chance, so I was round that counter very

skorry and had a hold of her, and a horrorshow big lump she

was too, all nuking of scent and with flipflop big bobbing

groodies on her.  I'd got my rooker round her rot to stop her

belting out death and destruction to the four winds of

heaven, but this lady doggie gave me a large foul big bite on it

and it was me that did the creeching, and then she opened up

beautiful with a flip yell for the millicents.  Well, then she had

to be tolchocked proper with one of the weights for the

scales, and then a fair tap with a crowbar they had for opening

cases, and that brought the red out like an old friend.  So we

had her down on the floor and a rip of her platties for fun and

a gentle bit of the boot to stop her moaning.  And, viddying

her lying there with her groodies on show, I wondered should

I or not, but that was for later on in the evening.  Then we

cleaned the till, and there was flip horrorshow takings that

nochy, and we had a few packs of the very best top cancers

apiece, then off we went, my brothers.

"A real big heavy great bastard he was," Dim kept saying.  I

didn't like the look of Dim: he looked dirty and untidy, like a

veck who'd been in a fight, which he had been, of course, but

you should never look as though you have been.  His cravat

was like someone had trampled on it, his maskie had been

pulled off and he had floor-dirt on his litso, so we got him in

an alleyway and tidied him up a malenky bit, soaking our

tashtooks in spit to cheest the dirt off.  The things we did for

old Dim.  We were back in the Duke of New York very skorry

and I reckoned by my watch we hadn't been more than ten

minutes away.  The starry old baboochkas were still there on

the black and suds and Scotchmen we'd bought them, and we

said: "Hallo there, girlies, what's it going to be?"  They started

on the old "Very kind, lads, God bless you, boys," and so we

rang the collocol and brought a different waiter in this time

and we ordered beers with rum in, being sore athirst, my

brothers, and whatever the old ptitsas wanted.  Then I said to

the old baboochkas: "We haven't been out of here, have we?

Been here all the time, haven't we?"  They all caught on real

skorry and said:

"That's right, lads.  Not been out of our sight, you haven't.

God bless you, boys," drinking.

Not that it mattered much, really.  About half an hour went

by before there was any sign of life among the millicents, and

then it was only two very young rozzes that came in, very

pink under their big copper's shlemmies.  One said:

"You lot know anything about the happenings at Slouse's

shop this night?"

"Us?"  I said, innocent.  "Why, what happened?"

"Stealing and roughing.  Two hospitalizations.  Where've

you lot been this evening?"

"I don't go for that nasty tone," I said.  "I don't care much

for these nasty insinuations.  A very suspicious nature all this

betokeneth, my little brothers."

"They've been in here all night, lads," the old sharps started

to creech out.  "God bless them, there's no better lot of boys

living for kindness and generosity.  Been here all the time they

have.  Not seen them move we haven't."

"We're only asking," said the other young millicent.  "We've

got our job to do like anyone else."  But they gave us the nasty

warning look before they went out.  As they were going out

we handed them a bit of lip-music: brrrrzzzzrrrr.  But, myself, I

couldn't help a bit of disappointment at things as they were

those days.  Nothing to fight against really.  Everything as easy

as kiss-my-sharries.  Still, the night was still very young.

2

When we got outside of the Duke of New York we viddied by

the main bar's long lighted window, a burbling old pyahnitsa

or drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and

going blerp blerp in between as though it might be a filthy old

orchestra in his stinking rotten guts.  One veshch I could never

stand was that.  I could never stand to see a moodge all filthy

and rolling and burping and drunk, whatever his age might be,

but more especially when he was real starry like this one was.

He was sort of flattened to the wall and his platties were a

disgrace, all creased and untidy and covered in cal and mud

and filth and stuff.  So we got hold of him and cracked him

with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on

singing.  The song went:

    And I will go back to my darling, my darling,

    When you, my darling, are gone.

But when Dim fisted him a few times on his filthy drunkard's

rot he shut up singing and started to creech: "Go on, do me in,

you bastard cowards,  I don't want to live anyway, not in a

stinking world like this one."  I told Dim to lay off a bit then,

because it used to interest me sometimes to slooshy what

some of these starry decreps had to say about life and the

world.  I said: "Oh.  And what's stinking about it?"

He cried out: "It's a stinking world because it lets the young

get on to the old like you done, and there's no law nor order

no more."  He was creeching out loud and waving his rookers

and making real horrorshow with the slovos, only the odd

blurp blurp coming from his keeshkas, like something was

orbiting within, or like some very rude interrupting sort of a

moodge making a shoom, so that this old veck kept sort of

threatening it with his fists, shouting: "It's no world for any

old man any longer, and that means that I'm not one bit

scared of you, my boyos, because I'm too drunk to feel the

pain if you hit me, and if you kill me I'll be glad to be dead."

We smecked and then grinned but said nothing, and then he

said: "What sort of a world is it at all?  Men on the moon and

men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a

lamp, and there's not more attention paid to earthly law nor

order no more.  So your worst you may do, you filthy cow-

ardly hooligans."  Then he gave us some lip-music -

"Prrrrzzzzrrrr" - like we'd done to those young millicents, and

then he started singing again:

    Oh dear dear land, I fought for thee

    And brought thee peace and victory -

So we cracked into him lovely, grinning all over our litsos,

but he still went on singing.  Then we tripped him so he laid

down flat and heavy and a bucketload of beer-vomit came

whooshing out.  That was disgusting so we gave him the boot,

one go each, and then it was blood, not song nor vomit, that

came out of his filthy old rot.  Then we went on our way.

It was round by the Municipal Power Plant that we came

across Billyboy and his five droogs.  Now in those days, my

brothers, the teaming up was mostly by fours or fives, these

being like auto-teams, four being a comfy number for an

auto, and six being the outside limit for gang-size.  Sometimes

gangs would gang up so as to make like malenky armies for

big night-war, but mostly it was best to roam in these like

small numbers.  Billyboy was something that made me want to

sick just to viddy his fat grinning litso, and he always had this

von of very stale oil that's been used for frying over and over,

even when he was dressed in his best platties, like now.  They

viddied us just as we viddied them, and there was like a very

quit kind of watching each other now.  This would be real,

this would be proper, this would be the nozh, the oozy, the

britva, not just fisties and boots.  Billyboy and his droogs

stopped what they were doing, which was just getting ready

to perform something on a weepy young devotchka they had

there, not more than ten, she creeching away but with her

platties still on.  Billyboy holding her by one rooker and his

number-one, Leo, holding the other.  They'd probably just

been doing the dirty slovo part of the act before getting down

to a malenky bit of ultra-violence.  When they viddied us a-

coming they let go of this boo-hooing little ptitsa, there

being plenty more where she came from, and she ran with her

thin white legs flashing through the dark, still going "Oh oh

oh".  I said, smiling very wide and droogie: "Well, if it isn't fat

stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison.  How art thou, thou

globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil?  Come and get one in

the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou."

And then we started.

There were four of us to six of them, like I have already

indicated, but poor old Dim, for all his dimness, was worth

three of the others in sheer madness and dirty fighting.  Dim

had a real horrorshow length of oozy or chain round his

waist, twice wound round, and he unwound this and began to

swing it beautiful in the eyes or glazzies.  Pete and Georgie had

good sharp nozhes, but I for my own part had a fine starry

horrorshow cut-throat britva which, at that time, I could flash

and shine artistic.  So there we were dratsing away in the dark,

the old Luna with men on it just coming up, the stars stabbing

away as it might be knives anxious to join in the dratsing.

With my britva I managed to slit right down the front of one

of Billyboy's droog's platties, very very neat and not even

touching the plott under the cloth.  Then in the dratsing this

droog of Billyboy's suddenly found himself all opened up like

a peapod, with his belly bare and his poor old yarbles show-

ing, and then he got very razdraz, waving and screaming

and losing his guard and letting in old Dim with his chain

snaking whisssssshhhhhhhhh, so that old Dim chained him

right in the glazzies, and this droog of Billyboy's went totter-

ing off and howling his heart out.  We were doing very hor-

rorshow, and soon we had Billyboy's number-one down

underfoot, blinded with old Dim's chain and crawling and

howling about like an animal, but with one fair boot on the

gulliver he was out and out and out.

Of the four of us Dim, as usual, came out the worst in point

of looks, that is to say his litso was all bloodied and his

platties a dirty mess, but the others of us were still cool and

whole.  It was stinking fatty Billyboy I wanted now, and there I

was dancing about with my britva like I might be a barber on

board a ship on a very rough sea, trying to get in at him with a

few fair slashes on his unclean oily litso.  Billyboy had a nozh,

a long flick-type, but he was a malenky bit too slow and heavy

in his movements to vred anyone really bad.  And, my

brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz - left two

three, right two three - and carve left cheeky and right cheeky,

so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the

same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the

winter starlight.  Down this blood poured in like red curtains,

but you could viddy Billyboy felt not a thing, and he went

lumbering on like a filthy fatty bear, poking at me with his

nozh.

Then we slooshied the sirens and knew the millicents were

coming with pooshkas pushing out of the police-auto-

windows at the ready.  That weepy little devotchka had told

them, no doubt, there being a box for calling the rozzes not

too far behind the Muni Power Plant.  "Get you soon, fear

not," I called, "stinking billygoat.  I'll have your yarbles off

lovely."  Then off they ran, slow and panting, except for

Number One Leo out snoring on the ground, away north

towards the river, and we went the other way.  Just round the

next turning was an alley, dark and empty and open at both

ends, and we rested there, panting fast then slower, then

breathing like normal.  It was like resting between the feet of

two terrific and very enormous mountains, these being the

flatblocks, and in the windows of all the flats you could

viddy like blue dancing light.  This would be the telly.  Tonight

was what thy called a worldcast, meaning that the same pro-

gramme was being viddied by everybody in the world that

wanted to, that being mostly the middle-aged middle-class

lewdies.  There would be some big famous stupid comic

chelloveck or black singer, and it was all being bounced off

the special telly satellites in outer space, my brothers.  We

waited panting, and we could slooshy the sirening millicents

going east, so we knew we were all right now.  But poor old

Dim kept looking up at the stars and planets and the Luna

with his rot wide open like a kid who'd never viddied any such

things before, and he said:

"What's on them, I wonder.  What would be up there on

things like that?"

I nudged him hard, saying: "Come, gloopy bastard as thou

art.  Think thou not on them.  There'll be life like down here

most likely, with some getting knifed and others doing the

knifing.  And now, with the nochy still molodoy, let us be on

our way, O my brothers."  The others smecked at this, but

poor old Dim looked at me serious, then up again at the stars

and the Luna.  So we went on our way down the alley, with the

worldcast blueing on on either side.  What we needed now was

an auto, so we turned left coming out of the alley, knowing

right away we were in Priestly Place as soon as we viddied the

big bronze statue of some starry poet with an apey upper lip

and a pipe stuck in a droopy old rot.  Going north we came to

the filthy old Filmdrome, peeling and dropping to bits

through nobody going there much except malchicks like me

and my droogs, and then only for a yell or a razrez or a bit of

in-out-in-out in the dark.  We could viddy from the poster on

the Filmdrome's face, a couple of fly-dirtied spots trained on

it, that there was the usual cowboy riot, with the archangels

on the side of the US marshal six-shooting at the rustlers out

of hell's fighting legions, the kind of hound-and-horny veshch

put out by Statefilm in those days.  The autos parked by the

sinny weren't all that horrorshow, crappy starry veshches

most of them, but there was a newish Durango 95 that I

thought might do.  Georgie had one of these polyclefs, as they

called them, on his keyring, so we were soon aboard - Dim

and Pete at the back, puffing away lordly at their cancers - and

I turned on the ignition and started her up and she grumbled

away real horrorshow, a nice warm vibraty feeling grumbling

all through your guttiwuts.  Then I made with the noga,

and we backed out lovely, and nobody viddied us take off.

We fillied round what was called the backtown for a bit,

scaring old vecks and cheenas that were crossing the roads

and zigzagging after cats and that.  Then we took the road

west.  There wasn't much traffic about, so I kept pushing the

old noga through the floorboards near, and the Durango 95

ate up the road like spaghetti.  Soon it was winter trees and

dark, my brothers, with a country dark, and at one place I ran

over something big with a snarling toothy rot in the head-

lamps, then it screamed and squelched under and old Dim at

the back near laughed his gulliver off - "Ho ho ho" - at that.

Then we saw one young malchick with his sharp, lubbilubbing

under a tree, so we stopped and cheered at them, then we

bashed into them both with a couple of half-hearted tol-

chocks, making them cry, and on we went.  What we were after

now was the old surprise visit.  That was a real kick and good

for smecks and lashings of the ultra-violent.  We came at last

to a sort of village, and just outside this village was a small

sort of a cottage on its own with a bit of garden.  The Luna

was well up now, and we could viddy this cottage fine and clear

as I eased up and put the brake on, the other three giggling like

bezoomny, and we could viddy the name on the gate of this

cottage veshch was HOME, a gloomy sort of a name.  I got out

of the auto, ordering my droogs to shush their giggles and act

like serious, and I opened this malenky gate and walked up to

the front door.  I knocked nice and gentle and nobody came,

so I knocked a bit more and this time I could slooshy some-

body coming, then a bolt drawn, then the door inched open

an inch or so, then I could viddy this one glazz looking out

at me and the door was on a chain.  "Yes?  Who is it?"  It

was a sharp's goloss, a youngish devotchka by her sound, so

I said in a very refined manner of speech, a real gentleman's

goloss:

"Pardon, madam, most sorry to disturb you, but my friend

and me were out for a walk, and my friend has taken bad all of

a sudden with a very troublesome turn, and he is out there on

the road dead out and groaning.  Would you have the good-

ness to let me use your telephone to telephone for an am-

bulance?"

"We haven't a telephone," said this devotchka.  "I'm sorry,

but we haven't.  You'll have to go somewhere else."  From

inside this malenky cottage I could slooshy the clack clack

clacky clack clack clackity clackclack of some veck typing

away, and then the typing stopped and there was this

chelloveck's goloss calling: "What is it, dear?"

"Well," I said, "could you of your goodness please let him

have a cup of water?  It's like a faint, you see.  It seems as

though he's passed out in a sort of a fainting fit."

The devotchka sort of hesitated and then said: "Wait."  Then

she went off, and my three droogs had got out of the auto

quiet and crept up horrorshow stealthy, putting their maskies

on now, then I put mine on, then it was only a matter of me

putting in the old rooker and undoing the chain, me having

softened up this devotchka with my gent's goloss, so that she

hadn't shut the door like she should have done, us being

strangers of the night.  The four of us then went roaring in,

old Dim playing the shoot as usual with his jumping up and

down and singing out dirty slovos, and it was a nice malenky

cottage, I'll say that.  We all went smecking into the room

with a light on, and there was this devotchka sort of cower-

ing, a young pretty bit of sharp with real horrorshow

groodies on her, and with her was this chelloveck who was

her moodge, youngish too with horn-rimmed otchkies on

him, and on a table was a typewriter and all papers scattered

everywhere, but there was one little pile of paper like that

must have been what he'd already typed, so here was another

intelligent type bookman type like that we'd fillied with some

hours back, but this one was a writer not a reader.  Anyway, he

said:

"What is this?  Who are you?  How dare you enter my house

without permission."  And all the time his goloss was trem-

bling and his rookers too.  So I said:

"Never fear.  If fear thou hast in thy heart, O brother, pray

banish it forthwith."  Then Georgie and Pete went out to find

the kitchen, while old Dim waited for orders, standing next to

me with his rot wide open.  "What is this, then?"  I said, picking

up the pile like of typing from off of the table, and the horn-

rimmed moodge said, dithering:

"That's just what I want to know.  What is this?  What do

you want?  Get out at once before I throw you out."  So poor

old Dim, masked like Peebee Shelley, had a good loud smeck

at that, roaring like some animal.

"It's a book," I said.  "It's a book what you are writing."  I

made the old goloss very coarse.  "I have always had the strong-

est admiration for them as can write books."  Then I looked

at its top sheet, and there was the name - A  C L O C K W O R K

O R A N G E - and I said: "That's a fair gloopy title.  Who ever

heard of a clockwork orange?"  Then I read a malenky bit out

loud in a sort of very high type preaching goloss: " - The

attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and

capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the

bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and

conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this

I raise my sword-pen - "  Dim made the old lip-music at that and

I had to smeck myself.  Then I started to tear up the sheets and

scatter the bits over the floor, and this writer moodge went

sort of bezoomny and made for me with his zoobies clenched

and showing yellow and his nails ready for me like claws.  So

that was old Dim's cue and he went grinning and going er er

and a a a for this veck's dithering rot, crack crack, first left

fistie then right, so that our dear old droog the red - red vino

on tap and the same in all places, like it's put out by the same

big firm - started to pour and spot the nice clean carpet and

the bits of this book that I was still ripping away at, razrez

razrez.  All this time this devotchka, his loving and faithful

wife, just stood like froze by the fireplace, and then she

started letting out little malenky creeches, like in time to the

like music of old Dim's fisty work.  Then Georgie and Pete

came in from the kitchen, both munching away, though with

their maskies on, you could do that with them on and no

trouble.  Georgie with like a cold leg of something in one

rooker and half a loaf of kleb with a big dollop of maslo on it

in the other, and Pete with a bottle of beer frothing its gulli-

ver off and a horrorshow rookerful of like plum cake.  They

went haw haw haw, viddying old Dim dancing round and

fisting the writer veck so that the writer veck started to platch

like his life's work was ruined, going boo hoo hoo with a

very square bloody rot, but it was haw haw haw in a muffled

eater's way and you could see bits of what they were eating.  I

didn't like that, it being dirty and slobbery, so I said:

"Drop that mounch.  I gave no permission.  Grab hold of this

veck here so he can viddy all and not get away."  So they put

down their fatty pishcha on the table among all the flying

paper and they clopped over to the writer veck whose horn-

rimmed otchkies were cracked but still hanging on, with old

Dim still dancing round and making ornaments shake on the

mantelpiece (I swept them all off then and they couldn't shake

no more, little brothers) while he fillied with the author of 'A

Clockwork Orange', making his litso all purple and dripping

away like some very special sort of a juicy fruit.  "All right,

Dim," I said.  "Now for the other veshch, Bog help us all."  So he

did the strong-man on the devotchka, who was still creech

creech creeching away in very horrorshow four-in-a-bar,

locking her rookers from the back, while I ripped away at this

and that and the other, the others going haw haw haw still,

and real good horrorshow groodies they were that then exhi-

bited their pink glazzies, O my brothers, while I untrussed and

got ready for the plunge.  Plunging, I could slooshy cries of

agony and this writer bleeding veck that Georgie and Pete held

on to nearly got loose howling bezoomny with the filthiest

of slovos that I already knew and others he was making up.

Then after me it was right old Dim should have his turn, which

he did in a beasty snorty howly sort of a way with his Peebee

Shelley maskie taking no notice, while I held on to her.  Then

there was a changeover, Dim and me grabbing the slobbering

writer veck who was past struggling really, only just coming

out with slack sort of slovos like he was in the land in a milk-

plus bar, and Pete and Georgie had theirs.  Then there was like

quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left

to be smashed - typewriter, lamp, chairs - and Dim, it was

typical of old Dim, watered the fire out and was going to dung

on the carpet, there being plenty of paper, but I said no.  "Out

out out out," I howled.  The writer veck and his zheena were

not really there, bloody and torn and making noises.  But

they'd live.

So we got into the waiting auto and I left it to Georgie to

take the wheel, me feeling that malenky bit shagged, and we

went back to town, running over odd squealing things on the

way.

3

We yeckated back townwards, my brothers, but just outside,

not far from what they called the Industrial Canal, we viddied

the fuel needle had like collapsed, like our own ha ha ha

needles had, and the auto was coughing kashl kashl kashl.  Not

to worry overmuch, though, because a rail station kept

flashing blue - on off on off - just near.  The point was

whether to leave the auto to be sobiratted by the rozzes or,

us feeling like in a hate and murder mood, to give it a fair

tolchock into the starry watersfor a nice heavy loud plesk

before the death of the evening.  This latter we decided on, so

we got out and, the brakes off, all four tolchocked it to the

edge of the filthy water that was like treacle mixed with

human hole products, then one good horrorshow tolchock

and in she went.  We had to dash back for fear of the filth

splashing on our platties, but splussshhhh and glolp she went,

down and lovely.  "Farewell, old droog," called Georgie, and

Dim obliged with a clowny great guff - "Huh huh huh huh."

Then we made for the station to ride the one stop to Center,

as the middle of the town was called.  We paid our fares nice

and polite and waited gentlemanly and quiet on the platform,

old Dim fillying with the slot machines, his carmans being full

of small malenky coin, and ready if need be to distribute

chocbars to the poor and starving, though there was none

such about, and then the old espresso rapido came lumbering

in and we climbed aboard, the train looking to be near empty.

To pass the three-minute ride we fillied about with what they

called the upholstery, doing some nice horrorshow tearing-

out of the seats' guts and old Dim chaining the okno till the

glass cracked and sparkled in the winter air, but we were all

feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been

an evening of some small energy expenditure, my brothers,

only Dim, like the clowny animal he was, full of the joys-of,

but looking all dirtied over and too much von of sweat on

him, which was one thing I had against old Dim.

We got out at Center and walked slow back to the

Korova Milkbar, all going yawwwww a malenky bit and exhi-

biting to moon and star and lamplight our back fillings, be-

cause we were still only growing malchicks and had school in

the daytime, and when we got into the Korova we found it

fuller than when we'd left earlier on.  But the chelloveck that

had been burbling away, in the land, on white and synthemesc

or whatever, was still on at it, going: "Urchins of deadcast in

the way-ho-hay glill platonic time weatherborn."  It was prob-

able that this was his third or fourth lot that evening, for he

had that pale inhuman look, like he'd become a 'thing', and like

his litso was really a piece of chalk carved.  Really, if he wanted

to spend so long in the land, he should have gone into one of

the private cubies at the back and not stayed in the big mesto,

because here some of the malchickies would filly about with

him a malenky bit, though not too much because there were

powerful bruiseboys hidden away in the old Korova who

could stop any riot.  Anyway, Dim squeezed in next to this

veck and, with his big clown's yawp that showed his hanging

grape, he stabbed this veck's foot with his own large filthy

sabog.  But the veck, my brothers, heard nought, being now all

above the body.

It was nadsats milking and coking and fillying around

(nadsats were what we used to call the teens), but there were a

few of the more starry ones, vecks and cheenas alike (but not

of the bourgeois, never them) laughing and govoreeting at the

bar.  You could tell them from their barberings and loose platties

(big stringy sweaters mostly) that they'd been on rehearsals at

the TV studios around the corner.  The devotchkas among them

had these very lively litsos and wide big rots, very red, show-

ing a lot of teeth, and smecking away and not caring about

the wicked world one whit.  And then the disc on the stereo

twanged off and out (it was Johnny Zhivago, a Russky

koshka, singing 'Only Every Other Day'), and in the like inter-

val, the short silence before the next one came on, one of

these devotchkas - very fair and with a big smiling red rot and

in her late thirties I'd say - suddenly came with a burst of

singing, only a bar and a half and as though she was like giving

an example of something they'd all been govoreeting about,

and it was like for a moment, O my brothers, some great bird

had flown into the milkbar, and I felt all the little malenky

hairs on my plott standing endwise and the shivers crawling

up like slow malenky lizards and then down again.  Because I

knew what she sang.  It was from an opera by Friedrich Gitter-

fenster called 'Das Bettzeug', and it was the bit where she's

snuffing it with her throat cut, and the slovos are 'Better like

this maybe'.  Anyway, I shivered.

But old Dim, as soon as he'd slooshied this dollop of song

like a lomtick of redhot meat plonked on your plate, let off

one of his vulgarities, which in this case was a lip-trump fol-

lowed by a dog-howl followed by two fingers pronging twice

at the air followed by a clowny guffaw.  I felt myself all of a

fever and like drowning in redhot blood, slooshying and

viddying Dim's vulgarity, and I said: "Bastard.  Filthy drooling

mannerless bastard."  Then I leaned across Georgie, who was

between me and horrible Dim, and fisted Dim skorry on the

rot.  Dim looked very surprised, his rot open, wiping the

krovvy off of his goober with his rook and in turn looking

surprised at the red flowing krovvy and at me.  "What for did

you do that for?" he said in his ignorant way.  Not many

viddied what I'd done, and those that viddied cared not.  The

stereo was on again and was playing a very sick electronic

guitar veshch.  I said:

"For being a bastard with no manners and not the dook of

an idea how to comport yourself publicwise, O my

brother."

Dim put on a hound-and-horny look of evil, saying: "I

don't like you should do what you done then.  And I'm not

your brother no more and wouldn't want to be."  He'd taken a

big snotty tashtook from his pocket and was mopping the red

flow puzzled, keeping on looking at it frowning as if he

thought that blood was for other vecks and not for him.  It

was like he was singing blood to make up for his vulgarity

when that devotchka was singing music.  But that devotchka

was smecking away ha ha ha now with her droogs at the bar,

her red rot working and her zoobies ashine, not having no-

ticed Dim's filthy vulgarity.  It was me really Dim had done

wrong to.  I said:

 "if you don't like this and you wouldn't want that, then you

know what to do, little brother."  Georgie said, in a sharp way

that made me look:

"All right.  Let's not be starting."

"That's clean up to Dim," I said.  "Dim can't go on all his

jeezny being as a little child."  And I looked sharp at Georgie.

Dim said, and the red krovvy was easing its flow now:

"What natural right does he have to think he can give the

orders and tolchock me whenever he likes?  Yarbles is what I

say to him, and I'd chain his glazzies out as soon as look."

"Watch that," I said, as quiet as I could with the stereo

bouncing all over the walls and ceiling and the in-the-land

veck beyond Dim getting loud now with his "Spark nearer,

ultoptimate", I said: "Do watch that, O Dim, if to continue to

be on live thou dost wish."

"Yarbles," said Dim, sneering, "great bolshy yarblockos to

you.  What you done then you had no right.  I'll meet you with

chain or nozh or britva any time, not having you aiming tol-

chocks at me reasonless, it stands to reason I won't have

it."

"A nozh scrap any time you say," I snarled back.  Pete said:

"Oh now, don't, both of you malchicks.  Droogs, aren't we?

It isn't right droogs should behave thiswise.  See, there are

some loose-lipped malchicks over there smecking at us, leer-

ing like.  We mustn't let ourselves down."

"Dim," I said, "has got to learn his place.  Right?"

"Wait," said Georgie.  "What is all this about place?  This is the

first I ever hear about lewdies learning their place."

Pete said: "If the truth is known, Alex, you shouldn't have

given old Dim that uncalled-for tolchock.  I'll say it once and

no more.  I say it with all respect, but if it had been me you'd

given it to you'd have to answer.  I say no more."  And he

drowned his litso in his milk-glass.

I could feel myself getting all razdraz inside, but I tried to

cover it, saying calm: "There has to be a leader.  Discipline

there has to be.  Right?"  None of them skazatted a word or

nodded even.  I got more razdraz inside, calmer out.  "I," I said,

"have been in charge long now.  We are all droogs, but some-

body has to be in charge.  Right?  Right?"  They all like nodded,

wary like.  Dim was osooshing the last of the krovvy off.  It

was Dim who said now:

"Right, right.  Doobidoob.  A bit tired, maybe, everybody is.

Best not to say more."  I was surprised and just that malenky

bit poogly to sloosh Dim govoreeting that wise.  Dim said:

"Bedways is rightways now, so best we go homeways.  Right?"  I

was very surprised.  The other two nodded, going right right

right.  I said:

"You understand about that tolchock on the rot, Dim.

It was the music, see.  I get all bezoomny when any veck

interferes with a ptitsa singing, as it might be.  Like that

then."

"Best we go off homeways and get a bit of spatchka," said

Dim.  "A long night for growing malchicks.  Right?"  Right right

nodded the other two.  I said:

"I think it best we go home now.  Dim has made a real

horrorshow suggestion.  If we don't meet day-wise, O my

brothers, well then - same time same place tomorrow?"

"Oh yes," said Georgie.  "I think that can be arranged."

"I might," said Dim, "be just that malenky bit late.  But same

place and near same time tomorrow surely."  He was still

wiping at his goober, though no krovvy flowed any longer

now.  "And," he said, "it is to be hoped there won't be no more

of them singing ptitsas in here."  Then he gave his old Dim guff,

a clowny big hohohohoho.  It seemed like he was too dim to

take much offence.

So off we went our several ways, me belching arrrrgh on

the cold coke I'd peeted.  I had my cut-throat britva handy in

case any of Billyboy's droogs should be around near the flat-

block waiting, or for that matter any of the other bandas or

gruppas or shaikas that from time to time were at war with

one.  Where I lived was with my dadda and mum in the flats of

Municipal Flatblock 18A, between Kingsley Avenue and Wil-

sonsway.  I got to the big main door with no trouble, though I

did pass one young malchick sprawling and creeching and

moaning in the gutter, all cut about lovely, and saw in the

lamplight also streaks of blood here and there like signatures,

my brothers, of the night's fillying.  And too I saw just by 18A

a pair of devotchka's neezhnies doubtless rudely wrenched off

in the heat of the moment, O my brothers.  And so in.  In the

hallway was the good old municipal painting on the walls -

vecks and ptitsas very well developed, stern in the dignity of

labour, at workbench and machine with not one stitch of

platties on their well-developed plotts.  But of course some of

the malchicks living in 18A had, as was to be expected, em-

bellished and decorated the said big painting with handy

pencil and ballpoint, adding hair and stiff rods and dirty bal-

looning slovos out of the dignified rots of these nagoy (bare,

that is) cheenas and vecks.  I went to the lift, but there was no

need to press the electric knopka to see if it was working or

not, because it had been tolchocked real horrorshow this

night, the metal doors all buckled, some feat of rare strength

indeed, so I had to walk the ten floors up.  I cursed and panted

climbing, being tired in plott if not so much in brain.  I wanted

music very bad this evening, that singing devotchka in the

Korova having perhaps started me off.  I wanted like a big feast

of it before getting my passport stamped, my brothers, at

sleep's frontier and the stripy shest lifted to let me through.

I opened the door of 10-8 with my own little klootch, and

inside our malenky quarters all was quiet, the pee and em both

being in sleepland, and mum had laid out on the table on

malenky bit of supper - a couple of lomticks of tinned sponge-

meat with a shive or so of kleb and butter, a glass of the old

cold moloko.  Hohoho, the old moloko, with no knives or

synthemesc or drencrom in it.  How wicked, my brothers,

innocent milk must always seem to me now.  Still I drank and

ate growling, being more hungry than I thought at first, and I

got fruit-pie from the larder and tore chunks off it to stuff

into my greedy rot.  Then I tooth-cleaned and clicked, cleaning

out the old rot with my yahzick or tongue, then I went into

my own little room or den, easing off my platties as I did so.

Here was my bed and my stereo, pride of my jeezny, and my

discs in their cupboard, and banners and flags on the wall,

these being like remembrances of my corrective school life

since I was eleven, O my brothers, each one shining and blaz-

oned with name or number: SOUTH 4; METRO COR-

SKOL BLUE DIVISION; THE BOYS OF ALPHA.

The little speakers of my stereo were  all arranged round the

room, on ceiling, walls, floor, so, lying on my bed slooshying

the music, I was like netted and meshed in the orchestra.  Now

what I fancied first tonight was this new violin concerto by

the American Geoffrey Plautus, played by Odysseus Choerilos

with the Macon (Georgia) Philharmonic, so I slid it from

where it was neatly filed and switched on and waited.

Then, brothers, it came.  Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven.  I lay all

nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow,

glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of

lovely sounds.  Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made

flesh.  The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and

behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and

there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out

again crunched like candy thunder.  Oh, it was wonder of

wonders.  And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or

like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense

now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and

those strings were like a cage of silk around my bed.  Then flute

and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick

thick toffee gold and silver.  I was in such bliss, my brothers.

Pee and em in their bedroom next door had learnt now not to

knock on the wall with complaints of what they called noise.

I had taught them.  Now they would take sleep-pills.  Perhaps,

knowing the joy I had in my night music, they had already

taken them.  As I slooshied, my glazzies tight shut to shut in

the bliss that was better than any synthemesc Bog or God, I

knew such lovely pictures.  There were vecks and ptitsas, both

young and starry, lying on the ground screaming for mercy,

and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot in

their litsos.  And there were devotchkas ripped and creeching

against walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them, and

indeed when the music, which was one movement only, rose

to the top of its big highest tower, then, lying there on my

bed with glazzies tight shut and rookers behind my gulliver, I

broke and spattered and cried aaaaaaah with the bliss of it.

And so the lovely music glided to its glowing close.

After that I had lovely Mozart, the Jupiter, and there were

new pictures of different litsos to be ground and splashed, and

it was after this that I thought I would have just one last disc

only before crossing the border, and I wanted something

starry and strong and very firm, so it was J. S. Bach I had, the

Brandenburg Concerto just for middle and lower strings.  And,

slooshying with different bliss than before, I viddied again this

name on the paper I'd razrezzed that night, a long time ago it

seemed, in that cottage called HOME.  The name was about a

clockwork orange.  Listening to the J. S. Bach, I began to pony

better what that meant now, and I thought, slooshying away

to the brown gorgeousness of the starry German master, that

I would like to have tolchecked them both harder and ripped

them to ribbons on their own floor.

4

The next morning I woke up at oh eight oh oh hours, my

brothers, and as I still felt shagged and fagged and fashed and

bashed and my glazzies were stuck together real horrorshow

with sleepglue, I thought I would not go to school.  I thought

how I would have a malenky bit longer in the bed, an hour or

two say, and then get dressed nice and easy, perhaps even

having a splosh about in the bath, make toast for myself and

slooshy the radio or read the gazetta, all on my oddy knocky.

And then in the afterlunch I might perhaps, if I still felt like it,

itty off to the old skolliwoll and see what was vareeting in

the great seat of gloopy useless learning, O my brothers.  I

heard my papapa grumbling and trampling and then ittying off

to the dyeworks where he rabbited, and then my mum called

in in a very respectful goloss as she did now I was growing up

big and strong:

"It's gone eight, son.  You don't want to be late again."

So I called back: "A bit of pain in my gulliver.  Leave us be

and I'll try to sleep it off and then I'll be right as dodgers for

this after."  I slooshied her give a sort of a sigh and she said:

"I'll put your breakfast in the oven then, son.  I've got to be

off myself now."  Which was true, there being this law for

everybody not a child nor with child nor ill to go out rab-

biting.  My mum worked at one of the Statemarts, as they

called them, filling up the shelves with tinned soup and beans

and all that cal.  So I slooshied her clank a plate in the gas-

oven like and then she was putting her shoes on and then

getting her coat from behind the door and then sighing again,

then she said: "I'm off now, son."  But I let on to be back in

sleepland and then I did doze off real horrorshow, and I had a

queer and very real like sneety, dreaming for some reason of

my droog Georgie.  In this sneety he'd got like very much

older and very sharp and hard and was govoreeting about

discipline and obedience and how all the malchicks under his

control had to jump hard at it and throw up the old salute

like being in the army, and there was me in line like the rest

saying yes sir and no sir, and the I viddied clear that Georgie

had these stars on his pletchoes and he was like a general.  And

then he brought in old Dim with a whip, and Dim was a lot

more starry and grey and had a few zoobies missing as you

could see when he let out a smeck, viddying me, and then my

droog Georgie said, pointing like at me: "That man has filth

and cal all over his platties," and it was true.  Then I creeched:

"Don't hit, please don't, brothers," and started to run.  And I

was running in like circles and Dim was after me, smecking his

gulliver off, cracking with the old whip, and each time I got a

real horrorshow tolchock with this whip there was like a very

loud electric bell ringringring, and this bell was like a sort

of a pain too.

Then I woke up real skorry, my heart going bap bap bap,

and of course there was really a bell going brrrrr, and it was

our front-door bell.  I let on that nobody was at home, but

this brrrrr still ittied on, and then I heard a goloss shouting

through the door: "Come on then, get out of it, I know

you're in bed."  I recognized the goloss right away.  It was the

goloss of P. R. Deltoid (a real gloopy nazz, that one) what

they called my Post-Corrective Adviser, an overworked veck

with hundreds on his books.  I shouted right right right, in a

goloss of like pain, and I got out of bed and attired myself, O

my brothers, in a very lovely over-gown of like silk, with

designs of like great cities all over this over-gown.  Then I put

my nogas into very comfy wooly toofles, combed my

luscious glory, and was ready for P. R. Deltoid.  When I

opened up he came shambling in looking shagged, a battered

old shlapa on his gulliver, his raincoat filthy.  "Ah, Alex boy,"

he said to me.  "I met your mother, yes.  She said something

about a pain somewhere.  Hence not at schol, yes."

"A rather intolerable pain in the head, brother, sir," I said in

my gentleman's goloss.  "I think it should clear by this after-

noon."

"Or certainly by this evening, yes," said P. R. Deltoid.  "The

evening is the great time, isn't it, Alex boy?  Sit," he said, "sit,

sit," as though this was his domy and me his guest.  And he sat

in this starry rocking-chair of my dad's and began rocking, as

if that was all he had come for.  I said:

"A cup of the old chai, sir?  Tea, I mean."

"No time," he said.  And he rocked, giving me the old glint

under frowning brows, as if with all the time in the world.  "No

time, yes," he said, gloopy.  So I put the kettle on.  Then I

said:

"To what do I owe the extreme pleasure?  Is anything

wrong, sir?"

"Wrong?" he said, very skorry and sly, sort of hunched

looking at me but still rocking away.  Then he caught sight of

an advert in the gazetta, which was on the table - a lovely

smecking young ptitsa with her groodies hanging out to ad-

vertise, my brothers, the Glories of the Jugoslav Beaches.

Then, after sort of eating her up in two swallows, he said:

"Why should you think in terms of there being anything

wrong?  Have you been doing something you shouldn't,

yes?"

"Just a manner of speech," I said, "sir."

"Well," said P. R. Deltoid, "it's just a manner of speech from

me to you that you watch out, little Alex, because next time,

as you very well know, it's not going to be the corrective

school any more.  Next time it's going to be the barry place

and all my work ruined.  If you have no consideration for your

horrible self you at least might have some for me, who have

sweated over you.  A big black mark, I tell you in confidence,

for every one we don't reclaim, a confession of failure for

every one of you that ends up in the stripy hole."

"I've been doing nothing I shouldn't, sir," I said.  "The mil-

licents have nothing on me, brother, sir I mean."

"Cut out this clever talk about millicents," said P. R. Deltoid

very weary, but still rocking.  "Just because the police have not

picked you up lately doesn't, as you very well know, mean

you've not been up to some nastiness.  There was a bit of a

fight last night, wasn't there?  There was a bit of shuffling with

nozhes and bike-chains and the like.  One of a certain fat boy's

friends was ambulanced off late from near the Power Plant

and hospitalized, cut about very unpleasantly, yes.  Your name

was mentioned.  The word has got through to me by the usual

channels.  Certain friends of yours were named also.  There

seems to have been a fair amount of assorted nastiness last

night.  Oh, nobody can prove anything about anybody, as

usual.  But I'm warning you, little Alex, being a good friend to

you as always, the one man in this sick and sore community

who wants to save you from yourself."

"I appreciate all that, sir," I said, "very sincerely."

"Yes, you do, don't you?" he sort of sneered.  "Just watch it,

that's all, yes.  We know more than you think, little Alex."

Then he said, in a goloss of great suffering, but still rocking

away: "What gets into you all?  We study the problem and

we've been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but

we get no further with our studies.  You've got a good home

here, good loving parents, you've got not too bad of a brain.

Is it some devil that crawls inside you?"

"Nobody's got anything on me, sir," I said.  "I've been out of

the rookers of the millicents for a long time now."

"That's just what worries me," sighed P. R. Deltoid.  "A bit

too long of a time to be healthy.  You're about due now by my

reckoning.  That's why I'm warning you, little Alex, to keep

your handsome young proboscis out of the dirt, yes.  Do I

make myself clear?"

"As an unmuddied lake, sir," I said.  "Clear as an azure sky of

deepest summer.  You can rely on me, sir."  And I gave him a

nice zooby smile.

But when he'd ookadeeted and I was making this very

strong pot of chai, I grinned to myself over this veshch that

P. R. Deltoid and his droogs worried about.  All right, I do

bad, what with crasting and tolchocks and carves with the

britva and the old in-out-in-out, and if I get loveted, well, too

bad for me, O my little brothers, and you can't run a country

with every chelloveck comporting himself in my manner of

the night.  So if I get loveted and it's three months in this

mesto and another six in that, and the, as P. R. Deltoid so

kindly warns, next time, in spite of the great tenderness of my

summers, brothers, it's the great unearthly zoo itself, well, I

say: "Fair, but a pity, my lords, because I just cannot bear to

be shut in.  My endeavour shall be, in such future as stretches

out its snowy and lilywhite arms to me before the nozh

overtakes or the blood spatters its final chorus in twisted

metal and smashed glass on the highroad, to not get loveted

again."  Which is fair speeching.  But, brothers, this biting of

their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns

me into a fine laughing malchick.  They don't go into the cause

of goodness, so why the other shop?  If lewdies are good

that's because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with

their pleasures, and so of the other shop.  And I was patron-

izing the other shop.  More, badness is of the self, the one, the

you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old

Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty.  But the not-self

cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the

judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they

cannot allow the self.  And is not our modern history, my

brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big

machines?  I am serious with you, brothers, over this.  But

what I do I do because I like to do.

So now, this smiling winter morning, I drink this very

strong chai with moloko and spoon after spoon after spoon

of sugar, me having a sladky tooth, and I dragged out of the

oven the breakfast my poor old mum had cooked for me.  It

was an egg fried, that and no more, but I made toast and ate

egg and toast and jam, smacking away at it while I read the

gazetta.  The gazetta was the usual about ultra-violence and

bank robberies and strikes and footballers making everybody

paralytic with fright by threatening to not play next Saturday

if they did not get higher wages, naughty malchickiwicks as

they were.  Also there were more space-trips and bigger stereo

TV screens and offers of free packets of soapflakes in ex-

change for the labels on soup-tins, amazing offer for one

week only, which made me smeck.  And there was a bolshy big

article on Modern Youth (meaning me, so I gave the old bow,

grinning like bezoomny) by some very clever bald chelloveck.

I read this with care, my brothers, slurping away at the old

chai, cup after tass after chasha, crunching my lomticks of

black toast dipped in jammiwam and eggiweg.  This learned

veck said the usual veshches, about no parental discipline, as

he called it, and the shortage of real horrorshow teachers

who would lambast bloody beggary out of their innocent

poops and make them go boohoohoo for mercy.  All this was

gloopy and made me smeck, but it was like nice to go on

knowing one was making the news all the time, O my

brothers.  Every day there was something about Modern

Youth, but the best veshch they ever had in the old gazetta

was by some starry pop in a doggy collar who said that in his

considered opinion and he was govoreeting as a man of Bog

IT WAS THE DEVIL THAT WAS ABROAD and was

like ferreting his way into like young innocent flesh, and it was

the adult world that could take the responsibility for this with

their wars and bombs and nonsense.  So that was all right.  So

he knew what he talked of, being a Godman.  So we young

innocent malchicks could take no blame.  Right right right.

When I'd gone erk erk a couple of razzes on my full inno-

cent stomach, I started to get out day platties from my ward-

robe, turning the radio on.  There was music playing, a very

nice malenky string quartet, my brothers, by Claudius Bird-

man, one that I knew well.  I had to have a smeck, though,

thinking of what I'd viddied once in one of these like articles

on Modern Youth, about how Modern Youth would be better

off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like en-

couraged.  Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like

quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more

Civilized.  Civilized my syphilised yarbles.  Music always sort of

sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me feel like

old Bog himself, ready to make with the old donner and blit-

zen and have vecks and ptitsas creeching away in my ha ha

power.  And when I'd cheested up my litso and rookers a bit

and done dressing (my day platties were like student-wear:  the

old blue pantalonies with sweater with A for Alex) I thought

here at last was time to itty off to the disc-bootick (and

cutter too, my pockets being full of pretty polly) to see about

this long-promised and long-ordered stereo Beethoven

Number Nine (the Choral Symphony, that is), recorded on

Masterstroke by the Esh Sham Sinfonia under L. Muhaiwir.  So

out I went, brothers.

The day was very different from the night.  The night be-

longed to me and my droogs and all the rest of the nadsats,

and the starry bourgeois lurked indoors drinking in the

gloopy worldcasts, but the day was for the starry ones, and

there always seemed to be more rozzes or millicents about

during the day, too.  I got the autobus from the corner and

rode to Center, and then I walked back to Taylor Place, and

there was the disc-bootick I favoured with my inestimable

custom, O my brothers.  It had the gloopy name of MEL-

ODIA, but it was a real horrorshow mesto and skorry, most

times, at getting the new recordings.  I walked in and the only

other customers were two young ptitsas sucking away at ice-

sticks (and this, mark, was dead cold winter and sort of

shuffling through the new pop-discs - Johnny Burnaway,

Stash Kroh, The Mixers, Lay Quit Awhile With Ed And Id

Molotov, and all the rest of that cal).  These two ptitsas

couldn't have been more than ten, and they too, like me, it

seemed, evidently, had decided to take the morning off from

the old skolliwoll.  They saw themselves, you could see, as real

grown-up devotchkas already, what with the old hip-swing

when they saw your Faithful Narrator, brothers, and padded

groodies and red all ploshed on their goobers.  I went up to

the counter, making with the polite zooby smile at old Andy

behind it (always polite himself, always helpful, a real hor-

rorshow type of a veck, though bald and very very thin).  He

said:

"Aha.  I know what you want, I think.  Good news, good

news.  It has arrived."  And with like big conductor's rookers

beating time he went to get it.  The two young ptitsas started

giggling, as they will at that age, and I gave them a like cold

glazzy.  Andy was back real skorry, waving the great shiny

white sleeve of the Ninth, which had on it, brothers, the

frowning beetled like thunderbolted litso of Ludwig van him-

self.  "Here," said Andy.  "Shall we give it the trial spin?"  But I

wanted it back home on my stereo to slooshy on my oddy

knocky, greedy as hell.  I fumbled out the deng to pay and one

of the little ptitsas said:

"Who you getten, bratty?  What biggy, what only?"  These

young devotchkas had their own like way of govoreeting.

"The Heaven Seventeen?  Luke Sterne?  Goggly Gogol?"  And

both giggled, rocking and hippy.  Then an idea hit me and

made me near fall over with the anguish and ecstasy of it, O

my brothers, so I could not breathe for near ten seconds.  I

recovered and made with my new-clean zoobies and said:

"What you got back home, little sisters, to play your fuzzy

warbles on?"  Because I could viddy the discs they were buying

were these teeny pop veshches.  "I bet you got little save tiny

portable like picnic spinners."  And they sort of pushed their

lower lips out at that.  "Come with uncle," I said, "and hear all

proper.  Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones.  You are

invited."  And I like bowed.  They giggled again and one said:

"Oh, but we're so hungry.  Oh, but we could so eat."  The

other said: "Yah, she can say that, can't she just."  So I said:

"Eat with uncle.  Name your place."

Then they viddied themselves as real sophistoes, which was

like pathetic, and started talking in big-lady golosses about

the Ritz and the Bristol and the Hilton and Il Ristorante Gran-

turco.  But I stopped that with "Follow uncle," and I led them

to the Pasta Parlour just round the corner and let them fill

their innocent young litsos on spaghetti and sausages and

cream-puffs and banana-splits and hot choc-sauce, till I near

sicked with the sight of it, I, brothers, lunching but frugally off

a cold ham-slice and a growling dollop of chilli.  These two

young ptitsas were much alike, though not sisters.  They had

the same ideas or lack of, and the same colour hair - a like

dyed strawy.  Well, they would grow up real today.  Today I

would make a day of it.  No school this afterlunch, but edu-

cation certain, Alex as teacher.  Their names, they said, were

Marty and Sonietta, bezoomny enough and in the heighth of

their childish fashion, so I said:

"Righty right, Marty and Sonietta.  Time for the big spin.

Come."  When we were outside on the cold street they

thought they would not go by autobus, oh no, but by taxi, so

I gave them the humour, though with a real horrorshow in-

grin, and I called a taxi from the rank near Center.  The driver,

a starry whiskery veck in very stained platties, said:

"No tearing up, now.  No nonsense with them seats.  Just re-

upholstered they are."  I quieted his gloopy fears and off we

spun to Municipal Flatblock 18A, these two bold little ptitsas

giggling and whispering.  So, to cut all short, we arrived, O my

brothers, and I led the way up to 10-8, and they panted and

smecked away the way up, and then they were thirsty, they

said, so I unlocked the treasure-chest in my room and gave

these ten-year-young devotchkas a real horrorshow Scotch-

man apiece, though well filled with sneezy pins-and-needles

soda.  They sat on my bed (yet unmade) and leg-swung, smeck-

ing and peeting their highballs, while I spun their like pathetic

malenky discs through my stereo.  Like peeting some sweet

scented kid's drink, that was, in like very beautiful and lovely

and costly gold goblets.  But they went oh oh oh and said,

"Swoony" and "Hilly" and other weird slovos that were the

heighth of fashion in that youth group.  While I spun this cal

for them I encouraged them to drink and have another, and

they were nothing loath, O my brothers.  So by the time their

pathetic pop-discs had been twice spun each (there were two:

'Honey Nose', sung by Ike Yard, and 'Night After Day After

Night', moaned by two horrible yarbleless like eunuchs whose

names I forget) they were getting near the pitch of like young

ptitsa's hysterics, what with jumping all over my bed and me in

the room with them.

What was actually done that afternoon there is no need to

describe, brothers, as you may easily guess all.  Those two

were unplattied and smecking fit to crack in no time at all, and

they thought it the bolshiest fun to viddy old Uncle Alex

standing there all nagoy and pan-handled, squirting the hypo-

dermic like some bare doctor, then giving myself the old jab

of growling jungle-cat secretion in the rooker.  Then I pulled

the lovely Ninth out of its sleeve, so that Ludwig van was now

nagoy too, and I set the needle hissing on to the last move-

ment, which was all bliss.  There it was then, the bass strings

like govoreeting away from under my bed at the rest of the

orchestra, and then the male human goloss coming in and

telling them all to be joyful, and then the lovely blissful tune

all about Joy being a glorious spark like of heaven, and then I

felt the old tigers leap in me and then I leapt on these two

young ptitsas.  This time they thought nothing fun and

stopped creeching with high mirth, and had to submit to the

strange and weird desires of Alexander the Large which, what

with the Ninth and the hypo jab, were choodessny and zam-

mechat and very demanding, O my brothers.  But they were

both very very drunken and could hardly feel very much.

When the last movement had gone round for the second

time with all the banging and creeching about Joy Joy Joy

Joy, then these two young ptitsas were not acting the big lady

sophisto no more.  They were like waking up to what was

being done to their malenky persons and saying that they

wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast.  They looked

like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and

were all bruised and pouty.  Well, if they would not go to

school they must stil have their education.  And education

they had had.  They were creeching and going ow ow ow as

they put their platties on, and they were like punchipunching

me with their teeny fists as I lay there dirty and nagoy and fair

shagged and fagged on the bed.  This young Sonietta was cre-

eching: "Beast and hateful animal.  Filthy horror."  So I let them

get their things together and get out, which they did, talking

about how the rozzes should be got on to me and all that cal.

Then they were going down the stairs and I dropped off to

sleep, still with the old Joy Joy Joy Joy crashing and howling away.

5

What happened, though, was that I woke up late (near seven-

thirty by my watch) and, as it turned out, that was not so

clever.  You can viddy that everything in this wicked world

counts.  You can pony that one thing always leads to another.

Right right right.  My stereo was no longer on about Joy and I

Embrace Ye O Ye Millions, so some veck had dealt it the off,

and that would be either pee or em, both of them now being

quite clear to the slooshying in the living-room and, from the

clink clink of plates and slurp slurp of peeting tea from cups,

at their tired meal after the day's rabbiting in factory the one,

store the other.  The poor old.  The pitiable starry.  I put on my

over-gown and looked out, in guise of loving only son, to

say:

"Hi hi hi, there.  A lot better after the day's rest.  Ready now

for evening work to earn that little bit."  For that's what they

said they believed I did these days.  "Yum, yum, mum.  Any of

that for me?"  It was like some frozen pie that she'd unfroze

and then warmed up and it looked not so very appetitish, but

I had to say what I said.  Dad looked at me with a not-so-

pleased suspicious like look but said nothing, knowing he

dared not, and mum gave me a tired like little smeck, to thee

fruit of my womb my only son sort of.  I danced to the bath-

room and had a real skorry cheest all over, feeling dirty and

gluey, then back to my den for the evening's platties.  Then,

shining, combed, brushed and gorgeous, I sat to my lomtick

of pie.  Papapa said:

"Not that I want to pry, son, but where exactly is it you go

to work of evenings?"

"Oh," I chewed, "it's mostly odd things, helping like.  Here

and there, as it might be."  I gave him a straight dirty glazzy, as

to say to mind his own and I'd mind mine.  "I never ask for

money, do I?  Not money for clothes or for pleasures?  All

right, then, why ask?"

My dad was like humble mumble chumble.  "Sorry, son," he

said.  "But I get worried sometimes.  Sometimes I have dreams.

You can laugh if you like, but there's a lot in dreams.  Last

night I had this dream with you in it and I didn't like it one

bit."

"Oh?"  He had gotten me interessovatted now, dreaming of

me like that.  I had like a feeling I had had a dream, too, but I

could not remember proper what.  "Yes?"  I said, stopping

chewing my gluey pie.

"It was vivid," said my dad.  "I saw you lying on the street and

you had been beaten by other boys.  These boys were like the

boys you used to go around with before you were sent to

that last Corrective School."

"Oh?"  I had an in-grin at that, papapa believing I had really

reformed or believing he believed.  And then I remembered my

own dream, which was a dream of that morning, of Georgie

giving his general's orders and old Dim smecking around

toothless as he wielded the whip.  But dreams go by opposites

I was once told.  "Never worry about thine only son and heir,

O my father," I said.  "Fear not.  He canst taketh care of himself,

verily."

"And," said my dad, "you were like helpless in your blood

and you couldn't fight back."  That was real opposites, so I had

another quiet malenky grin within and then I took all the deng

out of my carmans and tinkled it on the saucy table-cloth.  I

said:

"Here, dad, it's not much.  It's what I earned last night.  But

perhaps for the odd peet of Scotchman in the snug some-

where for you and mum."

"Thanks, son," he said.  "But we don't go out much now.  We

daren't go out much, the streets being what they are.  Young

hooligans and so on.  Still, thanks.  I'll bring her home a bottle

of something tomorrow."  And he scooped this ill-gotten

pretty into his trouser carmans, mum being at the cheesting of

the dishes in the kitchen.  And I went out with loving smiles all

round.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs of the flatblock I

was somewhat surprised.  I was more than that.  I opened my

rot like wide in the old stony gapes.  They had come to meet

me.  They were waiting by the all scrawled-over municipal

wall-painting of the nagoy dignity of labour, bare vecks and

cheenas stern at the wheels of industry, like I said, with all this

dirt pencilled from their rots by naughty malchicks.  Dim had a

big thick stick of black greasepaint and was tracing filthy

slovos real big over our municipal painting and doing the old

Dim guff - wuh huh huh - while he did it.  But he turned round

when Georgie and Pete gave me the well hello, showing their

shining droogy zoobies, and he horned out: "He are here, he

have arrived, hooray," and did a clumsy turnitoe bit of danc-

ing.

"We got worried," said Georgie.  "There we were awaiting

and peeting away at the old knify moloko, and you might

have been like offended by some veshch or other, so round

we come to your abode.  That's right, Pete, right?"

"Oh, yes, right," said Pete.

"Appy polly loggies," I said careful.  "I had something of a pain

in the gulliver so had to sleep.  I was not wakened when I gave

orders for wakening.  Still, here we all are, ready for what

the old nochy offers, yes?"  I seemed to have picked up that

yes? from P. R. Deltoid, my Post-Corrective Adviser.  Very

strange.

"Sorry about the pain," said Georgie, like very concerned.

"Using the gulliver too much like, maybe.  Giving orders and

discipline and such, perhaps.  Sure the pain is gone?  Sure you'll

not be happier going back to the bed?"  And they all had a bit

of a malenky grin.

"Wait," I said.  "Let's get things nice and sparkling clear.  This

sarcasm, if I may call it such, does not become you, O my

little friends.  Perhaps you have been having a bit of a quiet

govoreet behind my back, making your own little jokes and

such-like.  As I am your droog and leader, surely I am entitled

to know what goes on, eh?  Now then, Dim, what does that

great big horsy gape of a grin portend?"  For Dim had his rot

open in a sort of bezoomny soundless smeck.  Georgie got in

very skorry with:

"All right, no more picking on Dim, brother.  That's part of

the new way."

"New way?" I said.  "What's this about a new way?  There's

been some very large talk behind my sleeping back and no

error.  Let me slooshy more."  And I sort of folded my rookers

and leaned comfortable to listen against the broken banister-

rail, me being still higher than them, droogs as they called

themselves, on the third stair.

"No offence, Alex," said Pete, "but we wanted to have things

more democratic like.  Not like you like saying what to do and

what not all the time.  But no offence."

George said: "Offence is neither here nor elsewhere.  It's the

matter of who has ideas.  What ideas has he had?"  And he kept

his very bold glazzies turned full on me.  "It's all the small stuff,

malenky veshches like last night.  We're growing up, brothers."

"More," I said, not moving.  "Let me slooshy more."

"Well," said Georgie, "if you must have it, have it then.  We

itty round, shop-crasting and the like, coming out with a piti-

ful rookerful of cutter each.  And there's Will the English in

the Muscleman coffee mesto saying he can fence anything that

any malchick cares to try to crast.  The shiny stuff, the ice," he

said, still with these like cold glazzies on me.  "The big big big

money is available is what Will the English says."

"So," I said, very comfortable out but real razdraz within.

"Since when have you been consorting and comporting with

Will the English?"

"Now and again," said Georgie, "I get around all on my oddy

knocky.  Like last Sabbath for instance.  I can live my own

jeezny, droogy, right?"

I didn't care for any of this, my brothers.  "And what will

you do," I said, "with the big big big deng or money as you so

highfaluting call it?  Have you not every veshch you need?  If

you need an auto you pluck it from the trees.  If you need

pretty polly you take it.  Yes?  Why this sudden shilarny for

being the big bloated capitalist?"

"Ah," said Georgie, "you think and govoreet sometimes like

a little child."  Dim went huh huh huh at that.  "Tonight," said

Georgie, "we pull a mansize crast."

So my dream had told truth, then.  Georgie the general

saying what we should do and what not do, Dim with the whip

as mindless grinning bulldog.  But I played with care, with great

care, the greatest, saying, smiling: "Good.  Real horrorshow.

Initiative comes to them as wait.  I have taught you much,

little droogie.  Now tell me what you have in mind, Georgie-

boy."

"Oh," said Georgie, cunning and crafty in his grin, "the old

moloko-plus first, would you not say?  Something to sharpen

us up, boy, but you especially, we having the start on you."

"You have govoreeted my thoughts for me," I smiled away.

"I was about to suggest the dear old Korova.  Good good

good.  Lead, little Georgie."  And I made with a like deep bow,

smiling like bezoomny but thinking all the time.  But when we

got into the street I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy

ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what

Bog sends.  For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.

There was an auto ittying by and it had its radio on, and I

could just slooshy a bar or so of Ludwig van (it was the Violin

Concerto, last movement), and I viddied right at once what to

do.  I said, in like a thick deep goloss:  "Right, Georgie, now,"

and I whisked out my cut-throat britva.  Georgie said: "Uh?"

but he was skorry enough with his nozh, the blade coming

sloosh out of the handle, and we were on to each other.  Old

Dim said: "Oh no, not right that isn't, and made to uncoil the

chain round his tally, but Pete said, putting his rooker firm on

old Dim: "Leave them.  It's right like that."  So then Georgie and

Your Humble did the old quiet cat-stalk, looking for openings,

knowing each other's style a bit too horrorshow really.  Georgie

now and then going lurch lurch with his shining nozh but not

no wise connecting.  And all the time lewdies passed by and

viddied all this but minded their own, it being perhaps a

common street-sight.  But then I counted odin dva tree and

went ak ak ak with the britva, though not at litso or glazzies

but at Georgie's nozh-holding rooker and, my little brothers,

he dropped.  He did.  He dropped his nozh with a tinkle tankle

on the hard winter sidewalk.  I had just ticklewickled his fingers

with my britva, and there he was looking at the malenky

dribble of krovvy that was redding out in the lamplight.  "Now,"

I said, and it was me that was starting, because Pete had given

old Dim the soviet not to uncoil the oozy from round his

tally and Dim had taken it, "now, Dim, let's thou and me have

all this now, shall us?"  Dim went, "Aaaaaaarhgh," like some

bolshy bezoomny animal, and snaked out the chain from his

waist real horrorshow and skorry, so you had to admire.  Now

the right style for me here was to keep low like in frog-dancing

to protect litso and glazzies, and this I did, brothers, so that

poor old Dim was a malenky bit surprised, him being accus-

tomed to the straight face-on lash lash lash.  Now I will say

that he whished me horrible on the back so that it stung like

bezoomny, but that pain told me to dig in skorry once and for

all and be done with old Dim.  So I swished with the britva at

his left noga in its very tight tight and I slashed two inches of

cloth and drew a malenky drop of krovvy to make Dim real

bezoomny.  Then while he went hauwwww hauwww hauwww

like a doggie I tried the same style as for Georgie, banking all

on one move - up, cross, cut - and I felt the britva go just deep

enough in the meat of old Dim's wrist and he dropped his

snaking oozy yelping like a little child.  Then he tried to drink

in all the blood from his wrist and howl at the same time, and

there was too much krovvy to drink and he went bubble

bubble bubble, the red like fountaining out lovely, but not for

very long.  I said:

"Right, my droogies, now we should know.  Yes, Pete?"

"I never said anything," said Pete.  "I never govoreeted one

slovo.  Look, old Dim's bleeding to death."

"Never," I said.  "One can die but once.  Dim died before he

was born.  That red red krovvy will soon stop."  Because I had

not cut into the like main cables.  And I myself took a clean

tashtook from my carman to wrap round poor old dying

Dim's rooker, howling and moaning as he was, and the

krovvy stopped like I said it would, O my brothers.  So they

knew now who was master and leader, sheep, thought I.

It did not take long to quieten these two wounded soldiers

down in the snug of the Duke of New York, what with large

brandies (bought with their own cutter, me having given all to

my dad, and a wipe with tashtooks dipped in the water-jug.

The old ptitsas we'd been so horrorshow to last night were

there again, going, "Thanks, lads" and "God bless you, boys"

like they couldn't stop, though we had not repeated the old

sammy act with them.  But Pete said: "What's it to be, girls?"

and bought black and suds for them, him seeming to have a

fair amount of pretty polly in his carmans, so they were on

louder than ever with their "God bless and keep you all,lads"

and "We'd never split on you, boys" and "The best lads breath-

ing, that's what you are."  At last I said to Georgie:

"Now we're back to where we were, yes?  Just like before

and all forgotten, right?"

"Right right right," said Georgie.  But old Dim still looked a

bit dazed and he even said: "I could have got that big bastard,

see, with my oozy, only some veck got in the way," as though

he'd been dratsing not with me but with some other malchick.

I said:

"Well, Georgieboy, what did you have in mind?"

"Oh," said Georgie, "not tonight.  Not this nochy, please."

"You're a big strong chelloveck," I said, "like us all.  We're

not little children, are we, Georgieboy?  What, then, didst

thou in thy mind have?"

"I could have chained his glazzies real horrorshow," said

Dim, and the old baboochkas were stil on with their "Thanks,

lads."

"It was this house, see," said Georgie.  "The one with the two

lamps outside.  The one with the gloopy name like."

"What gloopy name?"

"The Mansion or the Manse or some such piece of gloop.

Where this very starry ptitsa lives with her cats and all these

very starry valuable veshches."

"Such as?"

"Gold and silver and like jewels.  It was Will the English who

like said."

"I viddy," I said.  "I viddy horrorshow."  I knew where he

meant - Oldtown, just beyond Victoria Flatblock.  Well, the

real horrorshow leader knows always when like to give and

show generous to his like unders.  "Very good, Georgie," I said.

"A good thought, and one to be followed.  Let us at once itty."

And as we were going out the old baboochkas said: "We'll say

nothing, lads.  Been here all the time you have, boys."  So I

said: "Good old girls.  Back to buy more in ten minutes."  And

so I led my three droogs out to my doom.

6

Just past the Duke of New York going east was offices and

then there was the starry beat-up biblio and then was the

bolshy flatblock called Victoria Flatblock after some victory

or other, and then you came to the like starry type houses of

the town in what was called Oldtown.  You got some of the

real horrorshow ancient domies here, my brothers, with

starry lewdies living in them, thin old barking like colonels

with sticks and old ptitsas who were widows and deaf starry

damas with cats who, my brothers, had felt not the touch of

any chelloveck in the whole of their pure like jeeznies.  And

here, true, there were starry veshches that would fetch their

share of cutter on the tourist market - like pictures and jewels

and other starry pre-plastic cal of that type.  So we came nice

and quiet to this domy called the Manse, and there were globe

lights outside on iron stalks, like guarding the front door on

each side, and there was a light like dim on in one of the

rooms on the ground level, and we went to a nice patch of

street dark to watch through the window what was ittying on.

This window had iron bars in front of it, like the house was a

prison, but we could viddy nice and clear what was ittying on.

What was ittying on was that this starry ptitsa, very grey in

the voloss and with a very liny like litso, was pouring the old

moloko from a milk-bottle into saucers and then setting

these saucers down on the floor, so you could tell there were

plenty of mewing kots and koshkas writhing about down

there.  And we could viddy one or two, great fat scoteenas,

jumping up on to the table with their rots open going mare

mare mare.  And you could viddy this old baboochka talking

back to them, govoreeting in like scoldy language to her

pussies.  In the room you could viddy a lot of old pictures on

the walls and starry very elaborate clocks, also some like

vases and ornaments that looked starry and dorogoy.  Georgie

whispered: "Real horrorshow deng to be gotten for them,

brothers.  Will the English is real anxious."  Pete said: "How in?"

Now it was up to me, and skorry, before Georgie started

telling us how.  "First veshch," I whispered, "is to try the regular

way, the front.  I will go very polite and say that one of my

droogs has had a like funny fainting turn on the street.  Georgie

can be ready to show, when she opens, thatwise.  Then to

ask for water or to phone the doc.  Then in easy."  Georgie

said:

"She may not open."  I said:

"We'll try it, yes?"  And he sort of shrugged his pletchoes,

making with a frog's rot.  So I said to Pete and old Dim: "You

two droogies get either side of the door.  Right?"  They

nodded in the dark right right right.  "So,"  I said to Georgie,

and I made bold straight for the front door.  There was a

bellpush and I pushed, and brrrrrrr brrrrr sounded down the

hall inside.  Alike sense of slooshying followed, as though the

ptitsa and her koshkas all had their ears back at the brrrrrr

brrrrrr, wondering.  So I pushed the old zvonock a malenky bit

more urgent.  I then bent down to the letter-slit and called

through in a refined like goloss: "Help, madam, please.  My

friend has just had a funny turn on the street.  Let me phone a

doctor, please."  Then I could viddy a light being put on in the

hall, and then I could hear the old baboochka's nogas

going flip flap in flip-flap slippers to nearer the front door,

and I got the idea, I don't know why, that she had a big fat

pussycat under each arm.  Then she called out in a very sur-

prising deep like goloss:

"Go away.  Go away or I shoot."  Georgie heard that and

wanted to giggle.  I said, with like suffering and urgency in my

gentleman's goloss:

"Oh, please help, madam.  My friend's very ill."

"Go away," she called.  "I know your dirty tricks, making me

open the door and then buy things I don't want.  Go away.  I

tell you."  That was real lovely innocence, that was.  "Go away,"

she said again, "or I'll set my cats on to you."  A malenky bit

bezoomny she was, you could tell that, through spending her

jeezny all on her oddy knocky.  Then I looked up and I viddied

that there was a sash-window above the front door and that

it would be a lot more skorry to just do the old pletcho climb

and get in that way.  Else there'd be this argument all the long

nochy.  So I said:

"Very well, madam.  If you won't help I must take my

suffering friend elsewhere."  And I winked my droogies all away

quiet, only me crying out: "All right, old friend, you will surely

meet some good samaritan some place other.  This old lady

perhaps cannot be blamed for being suspicious with so many

scoundrels and rogues of the night about.  No, indeed not."

Then we waited again in the dark and I whispered: "Right.

Return to the door.  Me stand on Dim's pletchoes.  Open that

window and me enter, droogies.  Then to shut up that old

ptitsa and open up for all.  No trouble."  For I was like showing

who was leader and the chelloveck with the ideas.  "See," I said.

"Real horrorshow bit of stonework over that door, a nice

hold for my nogas."  They viddied all that, admiring perhaps I

thought, and said and nodded Right right right in the dark.

So back tiptoe to the door.  Dim was our heavy strong

malchick and Pete and Georgie like heaved me up on to Dim's

bolshy manly pletchoes.  All this time, O thanks to worldcasts

on the gloopy TV and, more, lewdies' night-fear through lack

of night-police, dead lay the street.  Up there on Dim's plet-

choes I viddied that this stonework above the door would

take my boots lovely.  I kneed up, brothers, and there I was.

The window, as I had expected, was closed, but I outed with

my britva and cracked the glass of the window smart with the

bony handle thereof.  All the time below my droogies were

hard breathing.  So I put in my rooker through the crack and

made the lower half of the window sail up open silver-

smooth and lovely.  And I was, like getting into the bath, in.

And there were my sheep down below, their rots open as they

looked up, O brothers.

I was in bumpy darkness, with beds and cupboards and

bolshy heavy stoolies and piles of boxes and books about.

But I strode manful towards the door of the room I was in,

seeing a like crack of light under it.  The door went

squeeeeeeeeeeak and then I was on a dusty corridor with

other doors.  All this waste, brothers, meaning all these

rooms and but one starry sharp and her pussies, but perhaps

the kots and koshkas had like separate bedrooms, living on

cream and fish-heads like royal queens and princes.  I could

hear the like muffled goloss of this old ptitsa down below

saying: "Yes yes yes, that's it," but she would be govoreeting to

these mewing sidlers going maaaaaaa for more moloko.

Then I saw the stairs going down to the hall and I thought to

myself that I would show these fickle and worthless droogs of

mine that I was worth the whole three of them and more.  I

would do all on my oddy knocky.  I would perform the old

ultra-violence on the starry ptitsa and on her pusspots if need

be, then I would take fair rookerfuls of what looked like real

polezny stuff and go waltzing to the front door and open up

showering gold and silver on my waiting droogs.  They must

learn all about leadership.

So down I ittied, slow and gentle, admiring in the stairwell

grahzny pictures of old time - devotchkas with long hair and

high collars, the like country with trees and horses, the holy

bearded veck all nagoy hanging on a cross.  There was a real

musty von of pussies and pussy-fish and starry dust in this

domy, different from the flatblocks.  And then I was down-

stairs and I could viddy the light in this front room where she

had been doling moloko to the kots and koshkas.  More, I

could viddy these great overstuffed scoteenas going in and

out with their tails waving and like rubbing themselves on the

door-bottom.  On a like big wooden chest in the dark hall I

could viddy a nice malenky statue that shone in the light of

the room, so I crasted this for my own self, it being like a

young thin devotchka standing on one noga with her rookers

out, and I could see this was made of silver.  So I had this

when I ittied into the lit-up room, saying: "Hi hi hi.  At last we

meet.  Our brief govoreet through the letter-hole was not,

shall we say, satisfactory, yes?  Let us admit not, oh verily not,

you stinking starry old sharp."  And I like blinked in the light at

this room and the old ptitsa in it.  It was full of kots and

koshkas all crawling to and fro over the carpet, with bits of

fur floating in the lower air, and these fat scoteenas were all

different shapes and colours, black, white, tabby, ginger, tor-

toise-shell, and of all ages, too, so that there were kittens

fillying about with each other and there were pussies full-

grown and there were real dribbling starry ones very bad-

tempered.  Their mistress, this old ptitsa, looked at me fierce

like a man and said:

"How did you get in?  Keep your distance, you villainous

young toad, or I shall be forced to strike you."

I had a real horrorshow smeck at that, viddying that she

had in her veiny rooker a crappy wood walking-stick which

she raised at me threatening.  So, making with my shiny

zoobies, I ittied a bit nearer to her, taking my time, and on the

way I saw on a like sideboard a lovely little veshch, the love-

liest malenky veshch any malchick fond of music like myself

could ever hope to viddy with his own two glazzies, for it was

like the gulliver and pletchoes of Ludwig van himself, what

they call a bust, a like stone veshch with stone long hair and

blind glazzies and the big flowing cravat.  I was off for that

right away, saying: "Well, how lovely and all for me."  But

ittying towards it with my glazzies like full on it and my

greedy rooker held out, I did not see the milk saucers on the

floor and into one I went and sort of lost balance.  "Whoops,"

I said, trying to steady, but this old ptitsa had come up behind

me very sly and with great skorriness for her age and then she

went crack crack on my gulliver with her bit of a stick.  So I

found myself on my rookers and knees trying to get up and

saying: "Naughty, naughty naughty."  And then she was going

crack crack crack again, saying: "Wretched little slummy

bedbug, breaking into real people's houses."  I didn't like this

crack crack eegra, so I grasped hold of one end of her stick as

it came down again and then she lost her balance and was

trying to steady herself against the table, but then the table-

cloth came off with a milk-jug and a milk-bottle going all

drunk then scattering white splosh in all directions, then she

was down on the floor, grunting, going: "Blast you, boy, you

shall suffer."  Now all the cats were getting spoogy and running

and jumping in a like cat-panic, and some were blaming each

other, hitting out cat-tolchocks with the old lapa and ptaaaaa

and grrrrr and kraaaaark.  I got up on to my nogas, and there

was this nasty vindictive starry forella with her wattles ashake

and grunting as she like tried to lever herself up from the

floor, so I gave her a malenky fair kick in the litso, and she

didn't like that, crying: "Waaaaah," and you could viddy her

veiny mottled litso going purplewurple where I'd landed the

old noga.

As I stepped back from the kick I must have like trod on the

tail of one of these dratsing creeching pusspots, because I

slooshied a gromky yauuuuuuuuw and found that like fur and

teeth and claws had like fastened themselves around my leg,

and there I was cursing away and trying to shake it off holding

this silver malenky statue in one rooker and trying to climb

over this old ptitsa on the floor to reach lovely Ludwig van in

frowning like stone.  And then I was into another saucer brim-

ful of creamy moloko and near went flying again, the whole

veshch really a very humorous one if you could imagine it

sloochatting to some other veck and not to Your Humble

Narrator.  And then the starry ptitsa on the floor reached over

all the dratsing yowling pusscats and grabbed at my noga, still

going "Waaaaah" at me, and, my balance being a bit gone, I

went really crash this time, on to sploshing moloko and

skriking koshkas, and the old forella started to fist me on the

litso, both of us being on the floor, creeching: "Thrash him,

beat him, pull out his finger-nails, the poisonous young

beetle," addressing her pusscats only, and then, as if like obey-

ing the starry old ptitsa, a couple of koshkas got on to me

and started scratching like bezoomny.  So then I got real be-

zoomny myself, brothers, and hit out at them, but this bab-

oochka said: "Toad, don't touch my kitties," and like

scratched my litso.  So then I screeched: "You filthy old

soomka", and upped with the little malenky like silver statue

and cracked her a fine fair tolchock on the gulliver and that

shut her up real horrorshow and lovely.

Now as I got up from the floor among all the crarking kots

and koshkas what should I slooshy but the shoom of the old

police-auto siren in the distance, and it dawned on me skorry

that the old forella of the pusscats had been on the phone to

the millicents when I thought she'd been govoreeting to the

mewlers and mowlers, her having got her suspicions skorry

on the boil when I'd rung the old zvonock pretending for

help.  So now, slooshying this fearful shoom of the rozz-

van, I belted for the front door and had a rabbiting time un-

doing all the locks and chains and bolts and other protective

veshches.  Then I got it open, and who should be on the door-

step but old Dim, me just being able to viddy the other two of

my so-called droogs belting off.  "Away," I creeched to Dim.

"The rozzes are coming."  Dim said: "You stay to meet them

huh huh huh," and then I viddied that he had his oozy out, and

then he upped with it and it snaked whishhh and he chained

me gentle and artistic like on the glazlids, me just closing

them up in time.  Then I was howling around trying to viddy

with this howling great pain, and Dim said: "I don't like you

should do what you done, old droogy.  Not right it wasn't to

get on to me like the way you done, brat."  And then I could

slooshy his bolshy lumpy boots beating off, him going huh

huh huh into the darkmans, and it was only about seven

seconds after that I slooshied the millicent-van draw up with a

filthy great dropping siren-howl, like some bezoomny animal

snuffing it.  I was howling too and like yawing about and I

banged my gulliver smack on the hall-wall, my glazzies being

tight shut and the juice astream from them, very agonizing.  So

there I was like groping in the hallway as the millicents ar-

rived.  I couldn't viddy them, of course, but I could slooshy

and damn near smell the von of the bastards, and soon I could

feel the bastards as they got rough and did the old twist-arm

act, carrying me out.  I could also slooshy one millicent goloss

saying from like the room I'd come out of with all the kots

and koshkas in it: "She's been nastily knocked but she's

breathing," and there was loud mewing all the time.

"A real pleasure this is," I heard another millicent goloss say

as I was tolchocked very rough and skorry into the auto.

"Little Alex all to our own selves."  I creeched out:

"I'm blind, Bog bust and bleed you, you grahzny bastards."

"Language, language," like smecked a goloss, and then I got

a like backhand tolchock with some ringy rooker or other

full on the rot.  I said:

"Bog murder you, you vonny stinking bratchnies.  Where are

the others?  Where are my stinking traitorous droogs?  One of

my cursed grahzny bratties chained me on the glazzies.  Get

them before they get away.  It was all their idea, brothers.

They like forced me to do it.  I'm innocent, Bog butcher you."

By this time they were all having like a good smeck at me with

the heighth of like callousness, and they'd tolchocked me into

the back of the auto, but I still kept on about these so-called

droogs of mine and then I viddied it would be no good, be-

cause they'd all be back now in the snug of the Duke of New

York forcing black and suds and double Scotchmen down the

unprotesting gorloes of those stinking starry ptitsas and

they saying: "Thanks, lads.  God bless you, boys.  Been here

all the time you have, lads.  Not been out of our sight you

haven't."

All the time we were sirening off to the rozz-shop, me being

wedged between two millicents and being given the odd

thump and malenky tolchock by these smecking bullies.  Then I

found I could open up my glazlids a malenky bit and viddy

like through all tears a kind of steamy city going by, all the

lights like having run into one another.  I could viddy now

through smarting glazzies these two smecking millicents at the

back with me and the thin-necked driver and the fat-necked

bastard next to him, this one having a sarky like govoreet at

me, saying: "Well, Alex boy, we all look forward to a pleasant

evening together, don't we not?"  I said:

"How do you know my name, you stinking vonny bully?

May Bog blast you to hell, grahzny bratchny as you are, you

sod."  So they all had a smeck at that and I had my ooko like

twisted by one of these stinking millicents at the back with

me.  The fat-necked not-driver said:

"Everybody knows little Alex and his droogs.  Quite a

famous young boy our Alex has become."

"It's those others," I creeched.  "Georgie and Dim and Pete.

No droogs of mine, the bastards."

"Well," said the fat-neck, "you've got the evening in front of

you to tell the whole story of the daring exploits of those

young gentlemen and how they led poor little innocent Alex

astray."  Then there was the shoom of another like police siren

passing this auto but going the other way.

"Is that for those bastards?" I said.  "Are they being picked up

by you bastards?"

"That," said fat-neck, "is an ambulance.  Doubtless for your

old lady victim, you ghastly wretched scoundrel."

"It was all their fault," I creeched, blinking my smarting glaz-

zies.  "The bastards will be peeting away in the Duke of New

York.  Pick them up blast you, you vonny sods."  And then

there was more smecking and another malenky tolchock, O

my brothers, on my poor smarting rot.  And then we arrived at

the stinking rozz-shop and they helped me get out of the auto

with kicks and pulls and they tolchocked me up the steps and I

knew I was going to get nothing like fair play from these

stinky grahzny bratchnies, Bog blast them.

7

They dragged me into this very bright-lit whitewashed can-

tora, and it had a strong von that was a mixture of like sick

and lavatories and beery rots and disinfectant, all coming

from the barry places near by.  You could hear some of the

plennies in their cells cursing and singing and I fancied I could

slooshy one belting out:

    'And I will go back to my darling, my darling,

    When you, my darling, are gone.'

But there were the golosses of millicents telling them to shut

it and you could even slooshy the zvook of like somebody

being tolchocked real horrorshow and going

owwwwwwwww, and it was like the goloss of a drunken

starry ptitsa, not a man.  With me in this cantora were four

millicents, all having a good loud peet of chai, a big pot of it

being on the table and they sucking and belching away over

their dirty bolshy mugs.  They didn't offer me any.  All that they

gave me, my brothers, was a crappy starry mirror to look

into, and indeed I was not your handsome young Narrator

any longer but a real strack of a sight, my rot swollen and my

glazzies all red and my nose bumped a bit also.  They all had a

real horrorshow smeck when they viddied my like dismay, and

one of them said: "Love's young nightmare like."  And then a

top millicent came in with like stars on his pletchoes to show

he was high high high, and he viddied me and said: "Hm."  So

then they started.  I said:

"I won't say one single solitary slovo unless I have my

lawyer here.  I know the law, you bastards."  Of course they all

had a good gromky smeck at that and then the stellar top millicent

said:

"Righty right, boys, we'll start off by showing him that we

know the law, too, but that knowing the law isn't everything."

He had a like gentleman's goloss and spoke in a very weary

sort of a way, and he nodded with a like droogy smile at one

very big fat bastard.  This big fat bastard took off his tunic and

you could viddy he had a real big starry pot on him, then he

came up to me not too skorry and I could get the von of the

milky chai he'd been peeting when he opened his rot in a like

very tired leery grin at me.  He was not too well shaved for a

rozz and you could viddy like patches of dried sweat on his

shirt under the arms, and you could get this von of like

earwax from him as he came close.  Then he clenched his stink-

ing red rooker and let me have it right in the belly, which was

unfair, and all the other millicents smecked their gullivers off

at that, except the top one and he kept on with this weary like

bored grin.  I had to lean against the white-washed wall so

that all the white got on to my platties, trying to drag the old

breath back and in great agony, and then I wanted to sick up

the gluey pie I'd had before the start of the evening.  But I

couldn't stand that sort of veshch, sicking all over the floor,

so I held it back.  Then I saw that this fatty bruiseboy was

turning to his millicent droogs to have a real horrorshow

smeck at what he'd done, so I raised my right noga and before

they could creech at him to watch out I'd kicked him smart

and lovely on the shin.  And he creeched murder, hopping

around.

But after that they all had a turn, bouncing me from one to

the other like some very weary bloody ball, O my brothers,

and fisting me in the yarbles and the rot and the belly and

dealing out kicks, and then at last I had to sick up on the floor

and, like some real bezoomny veck, I evan said: "Sorry,

brothers, that was not the right thing at all.  Sorry sorry

sorry."  But they handed me starry bits of gazetta and made me

wipe it, and then they made me make with the sawdust.  And then

they said, almost like dear old droogs, that I was to sit down

and we'd all have a quiet like govoreet.  And then P. R. Deltoid

came in to have a viddy, his office being in the same building,

looking very tired and grahzny, to say: "So it's happened, Alex

boy, yes?  Just as I thought it would.  Dear dear dear, yes."

Then he turned to the millicents to say: "Evening, inspector.

Evening, sergeant.  Evening, evening, all.  Well, this is the end of

the line for me, yes.  Dear dear, this boy does look messy,

doesn't he?  Just look at the state of him."

"Violence makes violence," said the top millicent in a very

holy type goloss.  "He resisted his lawful arresters."

"End of the line, yes," said P. R. Deltoid again.  He looked at

me with very cold glazzies like I had become a thing and was

no more a bleeding very tired battered chelloveck.  "I suppose

I'll have to be in court tomorrow."

"It wasn't me, brother, sir," I said, a malenky bit weepy.

"Speak up for me, sir, for I'm not so bad.  I was led on by the

treachery of the others,sir."

"Sings like a linnet," said the top rozz, sneery.  "Sings the

roof off lovely, he does that."

"I'll speak," said cold P. R. Deltoid.  "I'll be there tomorrow,

don't worry."

"If you'd like to give him a bash in the chops, sir," said the

top millicent, "don't mind us.  We'll hold him down.  He must

be another great disappointment to you."

P. R. Deltoid then did something I never thought any man

like him who was supposed to turn us baddiwads into real

horrorshow malchicks would do, especially with all those

rozzes around.  He came a bit nearer and he spat.  He spat.  He

spat full in my litso and then wiped his wet spitty rot with the

back of his rooker.  And I wiped and wiped and wiped my spat-

on litso with my bloody tashtook, saying "Thank you, sir,

thank you very much, sir, that was very kind of you, sir, thank

you."  And then P. R. Deltoid walked out without another

slovo.

The millicents now got down to making this long state-

ment for me to sign, and I thought to myself, Hell and blast

you all, if all you bastards are on the side of the Good then

I'm glad I belong to the other shop.  "All right," I said to them,

"you grahzny bratchnies as you are, you vonny sods.  Take it,

take the lot.  I'm not going to crawl around on my brooko

any more, you merzky gets.  Where do you want it taking

from, you cally vonning animals?  From my last corrective?

Horrorshow, horrorshow, here it is, then."  So I gave it to

them, and I had this shorthand milicent, a very quiet and

scared type chelloveck, no real rozz at all, covering page after

page after page after.  I gave them the ultra-violence, the crast-

ing, the dratsing, the old in-out-in-out, the lot, right up to

this night's veshch with the bugatty starry ptitsa with the

mewing kots and koshkas.  And I made sure my so-called

droogs were in it, right up to the shiyah.  When I'd got

through the lot the shorthand millicent looked a bit faint,

poor old veck.  The top rozz said to him, in a kind type goloss:

"Right, son, you go off and get a nice cup of chai for your-

self and then type all that filth and rottenness out with a

clothes-peg on your nose, three copies.  Then they can be

brought to our handsome young friend here for signature.

And you," he said to me, "can now be shown to your bridal

suite with running water and all conveniences.  All right," in

this weary goloss to two of the real tough rozzes, "take him

away."

So I was kicked and punched and bullied off to the cells and

put in with about ten or twelve other plennies, a lot of them

drunk.  There were real oozhassny animal type vecks among

them, one with his nose all ate away and his rot open like a

big black hole, one that was lying on the floor snoring away

and all like slime dribbling all the time out of his rot, and one

that had like done all cal in his pantalonies.  Then there were

two like queer ones who both took a fancy to me, and one of

them made a jump onto my back, and I had a real nasty bit of

dratsing with him and the von on him, like of meth and cheap

scent, made me want to sick again, only my belly was empty

now, O my brothers.  Then the other queer one started putting

his rookers on to me, and then there was a snarling bit of

dratsing between these two, both of them wanting to get at

my plott.  The shoom became very loud, so that a couple of

millicents came along and cracked into these two with like

truncheons, so that both sat quiet then, looking like into

space, and there was the old krovvy going drip drip drip down

the litso of one of them.  There were bunks in this cell, but all

filled.  I climbed up to the top one of one tier of bunks, there

being four in a tier, and there was a starry drunken veck snor-

ing away, most probably heaved up there to the top by the

millicents.  Anyway, I heaved him down again, him not being

all that heavy, and he collapsed on top of a fat drunk chello-

veck on the floor, and both woke and started creeching and

punching pathetic at each other.  So I lay down on this vonny

bed, my brothers, and went to very tired and exhausted and

hurt sleep.  But it was not really like sleep, it was like passing

out to another better world.  And in this other better world, O

my brothers, I was in like a big field with all flowers and trees,

and there was a like goat with a man's litso playing away on a

like flute.  And there rose like the sun Ludwig van himself

with thundery litso and cravat and wild windy voloss, and

then I heard the Ninth, last movement, with the slovos all a

bit mixed-up like they knew themselves they had to be mixed-

up, this being a dream:

    Boy, thou uproarious shark of heaven,

    Slaughter of Elysium,

    Hearts on fire, aroused, enraptured,

    We will tolchock you on the rot and kick

    your grahzny vonny bum.

But the tune was right, as I knew when I was being woke up

two or ten minutes or twenty hours or days or years later, my

watch having been taken away.  There was a millicent like miles

and miles down below and he was prodding at me with a long

stick with a spike on the end, saying:

"Wake up, son.  Wake up, my beauty.  Wake to real trouble."

I said:

"Why?  Who?  Where?  What is it?"  And the tune of the Joy

ode in the Ninth was singing away real lovely and horrorshow

within,  The millicent said:

"Come down and find out.  There's some real lovely news

for you, my son."  So I scrambled down, very stiff and sore and

not like real awake, and this rozz, who had a strong von of

cheese and onions on him, pushed me out of the filthy snor-

ing cell, and then along corridors, and all the time the old

tune Joy Thou Glorious Spark Of Heaven was sparking away

within.  Then we came to a very neat like cantora with type-

writers and flowers on the desks, and at the like chief desk the

top millicent was sitting, looking very serious and fixing a like

very cold glazzy on my sleepy litso.  I said:

"Well well well.  What makes, bratty.  What gives, this fine

bright middle of the nochy?"  He said:

"I'll give you just ten seconds to wipe that stupid grin off of

your face.  Then I want you to listen."

"Well, what?" I said, smecking.  "Are you not satisfied with

beating me near to death and having me spat upon and making

me confess to crimes for hours on end and then shoving me

among bezoomnies and vonny perverts in that grahzny cell?

Have you some new torture for me, you bratchny?"

"It'll be your own torture," he said, serious.  "I hope to God

it'll torture you to madness."

And then, before he told me, I knew what it was.  The old

ptitsa who had all the kots and koshkas had passed on to a

better world in one of the city hospitals.  I'd cracked her a bit

too hard, like.  Well, well, that was everything.  I thought of all

those kots and koshkas mewling for moloko and getting

none, not any more from their starry forella of a mistress.

That was everything.  I'd done the lot, now.  and me still only

fifteen.

Part Two

1

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

I take it up now, and this is the real weepy and like tragic

part of the story beginning, my brothers and only friends, in

Staja (State Jail, that is) Number 84F.  You will have little

desire to slooshy all the cally and horrible raskazz of the

shock that sent my dad beating his bruised and krovvy rockers

against unfair like Bog in his Heaven, and my mum squaring

her rot for owwwww owwwww owwwww in her mother's grief

at her only child and son of her bosom like letting every-

body down real horrorshow.  Then there was the starry very

grim magistrate in the lower court govoreeting some very

hard slovos against your Friend and Humble Narrator, after

all the cally and grahzny slander spat forth by P. R. Deltoid

and the rozzes, Bog blast them.  Then there was being rem-

anded in filthy custody among vonny perverts and pre-

stoopnicks.  Then there was the trial in the higher court with

judges and a jury, and some very very nasty slovos indeed

govoreeted in a very like solemn way, and then Guilty and my

mum boohoohooing when they said Fourteen Years, O my

brothers.  So here I was now, two years just to the day of

being kicked and clanged into Staja 84F, dressed in the heighth

of prison fashion, which was a one-piece suit of a very filthy

like cal colour, and the number sewn on the groody part just

above the old tick-tocker and on the back as well, so that

going and coming I was 6655321 and not your little droog

Alex not no longer.

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

It had not been like edifying, indeed it had not, being in this

grahzny hellhole and like human zoo for two years, being

kicked and tolchocked by brutal bully warders and meeting

vonny leering like criminals, some of them real perverts and

ready to dribble all over a luscious young malchick like your

story-teller.  And there was having to rabbit in the workshop

at making matchboxes and itty round and round and round

the yard for like exercise, and in the evenings sometimes some

starry prof type veck would give a talk on beetles or the Milky

Way or the Glorious Wonders of the Snowflake, and I had a

good smeck at this last one, because it reminded me of that

time of the tolchocking and Sheer Vandalism with that ded

coming from the public biblio on a winter's night when my

droogs were stil not traitors and I was like happy and free.  Of

those droogs I had slooshied but one thing, and that was one

day when my pee and em came to visit and I was told that

Georgie was dead.  Yes, dead, my brothers.  Dead as a bit of

dog-cal on the road.  Georgie had led the other two into a like

very rich chelloveck's house, and there they had kicked and

tolchocked the owner on the floor, and then Georgie had

started to razrez the cushions and curtains, and then old Dim

had cracked at some very precious ornaments, like statues

and so on, and this rich beat-up chelloveck had raged like real

bezoomny and gone for them all with a very heavy iron bar.

His being all razdraz had given him some gigantic strength,

and Dim and Pete had got out through the window, but Georgie

had tripped on the carpet and then brought this terrible

swinging iron bar crack and splodge on the gulliver, and that

was the end of traitorous Georgie.  The starry murderer had

got off with Self Defence, as was really right and proper.

Georgie being killed, though it was more than one year after me

being caught by the millicents, it all seemed right and proper

and like Fate.

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

I was in the Wing Chapel, it being Sunday morning, and the

prison charlie was govoreeting the Word of the Lord.  It was

my rabbit to play the starry stereo, putting on solemn music

before and after and in the middle too when hymns were sung.

I was at the back of the Wing Chapel (there were four along

here in Staja 84F) near where the warders or chassos were

standing with their rifles and their dirty bolshy blue brutal

jowls, and I could viddy all the plennies sitting down slooshy-

ing the Slovo of the Lord in their horrible cal-coloured

prison platties, and a sort of filthy von rose from them, not

like real unwashed, not grazzy, but like a special real stinking

von which you only got with the criminal types, my brothers,

a like dusty, greasy, hopeless sort of a von.  And I was thinking

that perhaps I had this von too, having become a real plenny

myself, though still very young.  So it was important to

me, O my brothers, to get out of this stinking grahzny zoo as

soon as I could.  And, as you will viddy if you keep reading on,

it was not long before I did.

"What's it going to be then, eh?" said the prison charlie for

the third raz.  "Is it going to be in and out and in and out of

institutions, like this, though more in than out for most of

you, or are you going to attend to the Divine Word and

realize the punishments that await the unrepentant sinner in

the next world, as well as in this?  A lot of blasted idiots you

are, most of you, selling your birthright for a saucer of cold por-

ridge.  The thrill of theft, or violence, the urge to live easy - is

it worth it when we have undeniable proof, yes yes, incon-

trovertible evidence that hell exists?  I know, I know, my

friends, I have been informed in visions that there is a place,

darker than any prison, hotter than any flame of human fire,

where souls of unrepentant criminal sinners like yourselves -

and don't leer at me, damn you, don't laugh - like yourselves,

I say, scream in endless and intolerable agony, their noses

choked with the smell of filth, their mouths crammed with

burning ordure, their skin peeling and rotting, a fireball spin-

ning in their screaming guts.  Yes, yes, yes, I know"

At this point, brothers, a plenny somewhere or other near

the back row let out a shoom of lip-music - 'Prrrrrp' - and

then the brutal chassos were on the job right away, rushing

real skorry to what they thought was the scene of the

schoom, then hitting out nasty and delivering tolchocks, left

and right.  Then they picked out one poor trembling plenny,

very thin and malenky and starry too, and dragged him off,

but all the time he kept creeching: "It wasn't me, it was him,

see," but that made no difference.  He was tolchocked real

nasty and then dragged out of the Wing Chapel creeching his

gulliver off.

"Now," said the prison charlie, "listen to the Word of the

Lord."  Then he picked up the big book and flipped over the

pages, keeping on wetting his fingers to do this by licking

them splurge splurge.  He was a bolshy great burly bastard

with a very red litso, but he was very fond of myself, me being

young and also now very interested in the big book.  It had

been arranged as part of my like further education to read in

the book and even have music on the chapel stereo while I

was reading, O my brothers.  And that was real horrorshow.

They would like lock me in and let me slooshy holy music by

J. S. Bach and G. F. Handel, and I would read of these starry

yahoodies tolchocking each other and then peeting their

Hebrew vino and getting on to the bed with their wives' like

hand-maidens, real horrorshow.  That kept me going,

brothers.  I didn't so much kopat the later part of the book,

which is more like all preachy govoreeting than fighting and

the old in-out.  But one day the charles said to me, squeezing

me like tight with his bolshy beefy rooker:  "Ah, 6655321,

think on the divine suffering.  Meditate on that, my boy."  And

all the time he had this rich manny von of Scotch on him, and

then he went off to his little cantora to peet some more.  So I

read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns

and then the cross veshch and all that cal, and I viddied better

that there was something in it.  While the stereo played bits of

lovely Bach I closed my glazzies and viddied myself helping in

and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in,

being dressed in a like toga that was the heighth of Roman

fashion.  So being in Staja 84F was not all that wasted, and the

Governor himself was very pleased to hear that I had taken to

like Religion, and that was where I had my hopes.

This Sunday morning the charlie read out from the book

about chellovecks who slooshied the slovo and didn't take a

blind bit being like a domy built upon sand, and then the rain

came splash and the old boomaboom cracked the sky and

that was the end of that domy.  But I thought that only a very

dim veck would have built his domy upon sand, and a right lot of

real sneering droogs and nasty neighbours a veck like that

would have, them not telling him how dim he was doing that

sort of building.  Then the charles creeched: "Right, you lot.

We'll end with Hymn Number 435 in the Prisoners' Hymnal."

Then there was a crash and plop and a whish whish while the

plennies picked up and dropped and lickturned the pages of

their grazzy malenky hymnbooks, and the bully fierce warders

creeched: "Stop talking there, bastards.  I'm watching you,

920537."  Of course I had the disc ready on the stereo, and

then I let the simple music for organ only come belting out

with a growwwwowwwwowwww.  Then the plennies started

to sing real horrible:

    Weak tea are we, new brewed

    But stirring make all strong.

    We eat no angel's food,

    Our times of trial are long.

They sort of howled and wept these stupid slovos with the

charlie like whipping them on with "Louder, damn you, sing

up," and the warders creeching: "Just you wait, 7749222", and

"One on the turnip coming up for you, filth."  Then it was all

over and the charlie said: "May the Holy Trinity keep you

always and make you good, amen," and the shamble out began

to a nice choice bit of Symphony No. 2 by Adrian Schweigsel-

ber, chosen by your Humble Narrator, O my brothers.  What a

lot they were, I thought, as I stood there by the starry chapel

stereo, viddying them all shuffle out going marrrrre and

baaaaaa like animals and up-your-piping with their grahzny

fingers at me, because it looked like I was very special

favoured.  When the last one had slouched out, his rookers

hanging like an ape and the one warder left giving him a fair

loud tolchock on the back of the gulliver, and when I had

turned off the stereo, the charlie came up to me, puffing away

at a cancer, still in his starry bogman's platties, all lacy and

white like a devotchka's.  He said:

"Thank you as always, little 6655321.  And what news have

you got for me today?"  The idea was, I knew, that this charlie

was after becoming a very great holy chelloveck in the world

of Prison Religion, and he wanted a real horrorshow tes-

timonial from the Governor, so he would go and govoreet

quietly to the Governor now and then about what dark plots

were brewing among the plennies, and he would get a lot of

this cal from me.  A lot of it would be all like made up, but

some of it would be true, like for instance the time it had

come through to our cell on the waterpipes knock knock

knockiknockiknock knockiknock that big Harriman was

going to break.  He was going to tolchock the warder at

slop-time and get out in the warder's platties.  Then there was

going to be a big throwing about of the horrible pishcha we

got in the dining-hall, and I knew about that and told.  Then

the charlie passed it on and was complimented like by the

Governor for his Public Spirit and Keen Ear.  So this time I

said, and this was not true:

"Well, sir, it has come through on the pipes that a con-

signment of cocaine has arrived by irregular means and that a

cell somewhere along Tier 5 is to be the centre of dis-

tribution."  I made all that up as I went along, like I made

up so many of these stories, but the prison charlie was very

grateful, saying: "Good, good, good.  I shall pass that on

to Himself," this being what he called the Governor.  Then I

said:

"Sir, I have done my best, have I not?"  I always used my very

polite gentleman's goloss govoreeting with those at the top.

"I've tried, sir, haven't I?"

"I think," said the charlie, "that on the whole you have,

6655321.  You've been very helpful and, I consider, shown a

genuine desire to reform.  You will, if you continue in this

manner, earn your remission with no trouble at all."

"But sir," I said, "how about this new thing they're talking

about?  How about this new like treatment that gets you out

of prison in no time at all and makes sure that you never get

back in again?"

"Oh," he said, very like wary.  "Where did you hear this?

Who's been telling you these things?"

"These things get around, sir," I said.  "Two warders talk, as it

might be, and somebody can't help hearing what they say.  And

then somebody picks up a scrap of newspaper in the work-

shops and the newspaper says all about it.  How about you

putting me in for this thing, sir, if I may make so bold as to

make the suggestion?"

You could viddy him thinking about that while he puffed

away at his cancer, wondering how much to say to me about

what he knew about this veshch I'd mentioned.  Then he said:

"I take it you're referring to Ludovico's Technique."  He was

still very wary.

"I don't know what it's called, sir," I said.  "All I know is that

it gets you out quickly and makes sure that you don't get in

again."

"That is so," he said, his eyebrows like all beetling while he

looked down at me.  "That is quite so, 6655321.  Of course, it's

only in the experimental stage at the moment.  It's very simple

but very drastic."

"But it's being used here, isn't it, sir?" I said.  "Those new like

white buildings by the South wall, sir.  We've watched those

being built, sir, when we've been doing our exercise."

"It's not been used yet," he said, "not in this prison,

6655321.  Himself has grave doubts about it.  I must confess I

share those doubts.  The question is whether such a technique

can really make a man good.  Goodness comes from within,

6655321.  Goodness is something chosen.  When a man cannot

choose he ceases to be a man."  He would have gone on with a

lot more of this cal, but we could slooshy the next lot of

plennies marching clank clank down the iron stairs to come

for their bit of Religion.  He said: "We'll have a little chat

about this some other time.  Now you'd better start the vol-

untary."  So I went over to the starry stereo and put on

J. S. Bach's 'Wachet Auf' Choral Prelude and in these grahzny

vonny bastard criminals and perverts came shambling like a

lot of broke-down apes, the warders or chassos like barking

at them and lashing them.  And soon the prison charlie was

asking them: "What's it going to be then, eh?"  And that's

where you came in.

We had four of these lomticks of like Prison Religion that

morning, but the charles said no more to me about this Lu-

dovico's Technique, whatever it was, O my brothers.  When I'd

finished my rabbit with the stereo he just govoreeted a few

slovos of thanks and then I was privodeeted back to the cell

on Tier 6 which was my very vonny and crammed home.  The

chasso was not really too bad of a veck and he did not tol-

chock or kick me in when he'd opened up, he just said: "Here

we are, sonny, back to the old waterhole."  And there I was

with my new type droogs, all very criminal but, Bog be

praised, not given to perversions of the body.  There was

Zophar on his bunk, a very thin and brown veck who went on

and on and on in his like cancery goloss, so that nobody

bothered to slooshy.  What he was saying now like to nobody

was "And at that time you couldn't get hold of a poggy" (what-

ever that was, brothers), "not if you was to hand over ten

million archibalds, so what do I do, eh, I goes down to

Turkey's and says I've got this sproog on that morrow, see,

and what can he do?"  It was all this very old-time real crimi-

nal's slang he spoke.  Also there was Wall, who had only one

glazzy, and he was tearing bits of his toe-nails off in honour of

Sunday.  Also there was Big Jew, a very fat sweaty veck lying

flat on his bunk like dead.  In addition there was Jojohn and

The Doctor.  Jojohn was very mean and keen and wiry and had

specialized in like Sexual Assault, and The Doctor had pre-

tended to be able to cure syph and gon and gleet but he had

only injected water, also he had killed off two devotchkas

instead, like he had promised, of getting rid of their unwanted

loads for them.  They were a terrible grahzny lot really, and I

didn't enjoy being with them, O my brothers, any more than

you do now, but it won't be for much longer.

Now what I want you to know is that this cell was intended

for only three when it was built, but there were six of us there,

all jammed together sweaty and tight.  And that was the state

of all the cells in all the prisons in those days, brothers, and a

dirty cally disgrace it was, there not being decent room for a

chelloveck to stretch his limbs.  And you will hardly believe

what I say now, which is that on this Sunday they brosatted in

another plenny.  Yes, we had had our horrible pishcha of

dumplings and vonny stew and were smoking a quiet cancer

each on our bunks when this veck was thrown into our midst.

He was a chinny starry veck and it was him who started cree-

ching complaints before we even had a chance to viddy the

position.  He tried to like shake the bars, creeching: "I demand

my sodding rights, this one's full-up, it's a bleeding im-

position, that's what it is."  But one of the chassos came back

to say that he had to make the best of it and share a bunk

with whoever would let him, otherwise it would have to be

the floor.  "And," said the warder, "it's going to get worse, not

better.  A right dirty criminal world you lot are trying to

build."

2

Well, it was the letting-in of this new chelloveck that was

really the start of my getting out of the old Staja, for he was

such a nasty quarrelsome type of plenny, with a very dirty

mind and filthy intentions, that trouble nachinatted that very

same day.  He was also very boastful and started to make with

a very sneery litso at us all and a loud proud goloss.  He made

out that he was the only real horrorshow prestoopnick in the

whole zoo, going on that he'd done this and done the other

and killed ten rozzes with one crack of his rooker and all that

cal.  But nobody was very impressed, O my brothers.  So then

he started on me, me being the youngest there, trying to say

that as the youngest I ought to be the one to zasnoot on the

floor and not him.  But all the others were for me, creeching:

"Leave him alone, you grahzny bratchny," and then he began

the old whine about how nobody loved him.  So that same

nochy I woke up to find this horrible plenny actually lying

with me on my bunk, which was on the bottom of the three-

tier and also very narrow, and he was govoreeting dirty like

love-slovos and stroke stroke stroking away.  So then I got

real bezoomny and lashed out, though I could not viddy all

that horrorshow, there being only this malenky little red light

outside on the landing.  But I knew it was this one, the vonny

bastard, and then when the trouble really got under way and

the lights were turned on I could viddy his horrible litso with

all krovvy dripping from his rot where I'd hit out with my

clawing rooker.

What sloochatted then, of course, was that me cell-mates

woke up and started to join in, tolchocking a bit wild in the

near-dark, and the shoom seemed to wake up the whole tier,

so that you could slooshy a lot of creeching and banging

about with tin mugs on the wall, as though all the plennies in

all the cells thought a big break was about to commence, O

my brothers.  So then the lights came on and the chassos came

along in their shirts and trousers and caps, waving big sticks.

We could viddy each other's flushed litsos and the shaking of

fisty rookers, and there was a lot of creeching and cursing.

Then I put in my complaint and every chasso said it was prob-

ably your Humble Narrator, brothers, that started it all

anyway, me having no mark of a scratch on me but this hor-

rible plenny dipping red red krovvy from the rot where I'd

got him with my clawing rooker.  That made me real be-

zoomny.  I said I would not sleep another nochy in that cell if

the Prison Authorities were going to allow horrible vonny

stinking perverted prestoopnicks to leap on my plott when I

was in no position to defend myself, being asleep.  "Wait till

the morning," they said.  "Is it a private room with bath and

television that your honour requires?  Well, all that will be

seen to in the morning.  But for the present, little droog, get

your bleeding gulliver down on your straw-filled podooshka

and let's have no more trouble from anyone.  Right right

right?"  Then off they went with stern warnings for all, then

soon after the lights went out, and then I said I would sit up

all the rest of the nochy, saying first to this horrible pre-

stoopnick: "Go on, get on my bunk if you wish it.  I fancy it no

longer.  You have made it filthy and cally with your horrible

vonny plott lying on it already."  But then the others joined in.

Big Jew said, still sweating from the bit of a bitva we'd had in

the dark:

"Not having that we're not, brotherth.  Don't give in to the

thquirt."  So this new one said:

"Crash your dermott, yid," meaning to shut up, but it was

very insulting.  So then Big Jew got ready to launch a tol-

chock.  The Doctor said:

"Come on, gentlemen, we don't want any trouble, do we?"

in his very high-class goloss, but this new prestoopnick was

really asking for it.  You could viddy that he thought he was a

very big bolshy veck and it was beneath his dignity to be

sharing a cell with six and having to sleep on the floor till I

made this gesture at him.  In his sneery way he tried to take off

The Doctor, saying:

"Owwww, yew wahnt noo moor trouble, is that it, Archi-

balls?"  So Jojohn, mean and keen and wiry, said:

"If we can't have sleep let's have some education.  Our new

friend here had better be taught a lesson."  Although he like

specialized in Sexual Assault he had a nice way of govoreeting,

quiet and like precise.  So the new plenny sneered:

"Kish and kosh and koosh, you little terror."  So then it all

really started, but in a queer like gentle way, with nobody

raising his goloss much.  The new plenny creeched a malenky

bit at first, but the Wall fisted his rot while Big Jew held him

up against the bars so that he could be viddied in the malenky

red light from the landing, and he just went oh oh oh.  He was

not a very strong type of veck, being very feeble in his trying

to tolchock back, and I suppose he made up for this by being

shoomny in the goloss and very boastful.  Anyway, seeing the

old krovvy flow red in the red light, I felt the old joy like rising

up in my keeshkas and I said:

"Leave him to me, go on, let me have him now, brothers."

So Big Jew said:

"Yeth, yeth, boyth, that'th fair.  Thlosh him then, Alekth."  So

they all stood around while I cracked at this prestoopnick in

the near dark.  I fisted him all over, dancing about with my

boots on though unlaced, and then I tripped him and he went

crash crash on to the floor.  I gave him one real horrorshow

kick on the gulliver and he went ohhhh, then he sort of

snorted off to like sleep, and The Doctor said:

"Very well, I think that wil be enough of a lesson," squinting

to viddy this downed and beaten-up veck on the floor.  "Let

him dream perhaps about being a better boy in the future."  So

we all climbed back into our bunks, being very tired now.

What I dreamt of, O my brothers, was of being in some very

big orchestra, hundreds and hundreds strong, and the con-

ductor was a like mixture of Ludwig van and G. F. Handel,

looking very deaf and blind and weary of the world.  I was

with the wind instruments, but what I was playing was like a

white pinky bassoon made of flesh and growing out of my

plott, right in the middle of my belly, and when I blew into it I

had to smeck ha ha ha very loud because it like tickled, and

then Ludwig van G. F. got very razdraz and bezoomny.  Then

he came right up to my litso and creeched loud in my ooko,

and then I woke up like sweating.  Of course, what the loud

shoom really was was the prison buzzer going brrrrr brrrrr

brrrrr.  It was winter morning and my glazzies were all cally

with sleepglue, and when I opened up they were very sore in

the electric light that had been switched on all over the zoo.

Then I looked down and viddied this new prestoopnick lying

on the floor, very bloody and bruisy and still out out out.

Then I remembered about last night and that made me smeck

a bit.

But when I got off the bunk and moved him with my bare

noga, there was a feel of like stiff coldness, so I went over to

The Doctor's bunk and shook him, him always being very

slow at waking up in the morning.  But he was off his bunk

skorry enough this time, and so were the others, except for

Wall who slept like dead meat.  "Very unfortunate," The

Doctor said.  "A heart attack, that's what it must have been."

Then he said, looking round at us all: "You really shouldn't

have gone for him like that.  It was most ill-advised really."

Jojohn said:

"Come come, doc, you weren't all that backward yourself

in giving him a sly bit of fist."  Then Big Jew turned on me,

saying:

"Alekth, you were too impetuouth.  That latht kick wath a

very very nathty one."  I began to get razdraz about this and

said:

"Who started it, eh?  I only got in at the end, didn't I?" I

pointed at Jojohn and said: "It was your idea."  Wall snored a

bit loud, so I said: "Wake that vonny bratchny up.  It was him

that kept on at his rot while Big Jew here had him up against

the bars."  The Doctor said:

"Nobody will deny having a little hit at the man, to teach

him a lesson so to speak, but it's apparent that you, my dear

boy, with the forcefulness and, shall I say, heedlessness of

youth, dealt him the coo de gras.  It's a great pity."

"Traitors," I said.  "Traitors and liars," because I could viddy

it was all like before, two years before, when my so-called

droogs had left me to the brutal rookers of the millicents.

There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the

way I could see it.  And Jojohn went and woke up Wall, and

Wall was only too ready to swear that it was Your Humble

Narrator that had done the real dirty tolchocking and brut-

ality.  When the chassos came along, and then the Chief

Chasso, and then the Governor himself, all these cell-droogs

of mine were very shoomny with tales of what I'd done to

oobivat this worthless pervert whose krovvy-covered plott

lay sacklike on the floor.

That was a very queer day, O my brothers.  The dead plott

was carried off, and then everybody in the whole prison had

to stay locked up until further orders, and there was no pishcha

given out, not even a mug of hot chai.  We just all sat there,

and the warders or chassos sort of strode up and down the

tier, now and then creeching "Shut it" or "Close that hole"

whenever they slooshied even a whisper from any of the cells.

Then about eleven o'clock in the morning there was a sort of

like stiffening and excitement and like the von of fear spread-

ing from outside the cell, and then we could viddy the

Governor and the Chief Chasso and some very bolshy im-

portant-looking chellovecks walking by real skorry, govoreet-

ing like bezoomny.  They seemed to walk right to the end

of the tier, then they could be slooshied walking back again,

more slow this time, and you could slooshy the Governor, a

very sweaty fatty fair-haired veck, saying slovos like "But, sir - "

and "Well, what can be done, sir?" and so on.  Then the whole

lot stopped at our cell and the Chief Chasso opened up.  You

could viddy who was the real important veck right away, very

tall and with blue glazzies and with real horrorshow platties

on him, the most lovely suit, brothers, I have ever viddied,

absolutely in the heighth of fashion.  He just sort of looked

right through us poor plennies, saying, in a very beautiful real

educated goloss: "The Government cannot be concerned any

longer with outmoded penological theories.  Cram criminals

together and see what happens.  You get concentrated crimi-

nality, crime in the midst of punishment.  Soon we may be

needing all our prison space for political offenders."  I didn't

pony this at all, brothers, but after all he was not govoreeting

to me.  Then he said: "Common criminals like this unsavoury

crowd" - (that meant me, brothers, as well as the others, who

were real prestoopnicks and treacherous with it) - "can best

be dealt with on a purely curative basis.  Kill the criminal

reflex, that's all.  Full implementation in a year's time.  Pun-

ishment means nothing to them, you can see that.  They enjoy

their so-called punishment.  They start murdering each other."

And he turned his stern blue glazzies on me.  So I said, bold:

"With respect, sir, I object very strongly to what you said

then.  I am not a common criminal, sir, and I am not un-

savoury.  The others may be unsavoury but I am not."  The

Chief Chasso went all purple and creeched:

"You shut your bleeding hole, you.  Don't you know who

this is?"

"All right, all right," said this big veck.  Then he turned to the

Governor and said: "You can use him as a trail-blazer.  He's

young, bold, vicious.  Brodsky will deal with him tomorrow

and you can sit in and watch Brodsky.  It works all right, don't

worry about that.  This vicious young hoodlum will be trans-

formed out of all recognition."

And those hard slovos, brothers, were like the beginning of

my freedom.

3

That very same evening I was dragged down nice and gentle by

brutal tolchocking chassos to viddy the Governor in his holy

of holies holy office.  The Governor looked very weary at me

and said:  "I don't suppose you know who that was this morn-

ing, do you, 6655321?"  And without waiting for me to say no

he said: "That was no less a personage than the Minister of the

Interior, the new Minister of the Interior and what they call a

very new broom.  Well, these new ridiculous ideas have come

at last and orders are orders, though I may say to you in

confidence that I do not approve.  I most emphatically do not

approve.  An eye for an eye, I say.  If someone hits you you hit

back, do you not?  Why then should not the State, very

severely hit by you brutal hooligans, not hit back also?  But the

new view is to say no.  The new view is that we turn the bad

into the good.  All of which seems to me grossly unjust.  Hm?"

So I said, trying to be like respectful and accomodating:

"Sir."  And then the Chief Chasso, who was standing all red

and burly behind the Governor's chair, creeched:

"Shut your filthy hole, you scum."

"All right, all right," said the like tired and fagged-out

Governor.  "You, 6655321, are to be reformed.  Tomorrow

you go to this man Brodsky.  It is believed that you will be

able to leave State Custody in a little over a fortnight.  In a

little over a fortnight you will be out again in the big free

world, no longer a number.  I suppose," and he snorted a bit

here, "that prospect pleases you?"  I said nothing so the Chief

Chasso creeched:

"Answer, you filthy young swine, when the Governor asks

you a question."  So I said:

"Oh, yes, sir.  Thank you very much, sir.  I've done my best

here, really I have.  I'm very grateful to all concerned."

"Don't be," like sighed the Governor.  "This is not a reward.

This is far from being a reward.  Now, there is a form here to

be signed.  It says that you are wiling to have the residue of

your sentence commuted to submission to what is called

here, ridiculous expression, Reclamation Treatment.  Will you

sign?"

"Most certainly I will sign," I said, "sir.  And very many

thanks."  So I was given an ink-pencil and I signed my name nice

and flowy.  The Governor said:

"Right.  That's the lot, I think."  The Chief Chasso said:

"The Prison Chaplain would like a word with him, sir."  So I

was marched out and off down the corridor towards the

Wing Chapel, tolchocked on the back and the gulliver all the

way by one of the chassos, but in a very like yawny and bored

manner.  And I was marched across the Wing Chapel to the

little cantora of the charles and then made to go in.  The

charles was sitting at his desk, smelling loud and clear of a fine

manny von of expensive cancers and Scotch.  He said:

"Ah, little 6655321, be seated."  And to the chassos: "Wait

outside, eh?"  Which they did.  Then he spoke in a very like

earnest way to me, saying: "One thing I want you to under-

stand, boy, is that this is nothing to do with me.  Were it

expedient, I would protest about it, but it is not expedient.

There is the question of my own career, there is the question

of the weakness of my own voice when set against the shout

of certain more powerful elements in the polity.  Do I make

myself clear?"  He didn't, brothers, but I nodded that he did.

"Very hard ethical questions are involved," he went on.  "You

are to be made into a good boy, 6655321.  Never again will

you have the desire to commit acts of violence or to offend

in any way whatsoever against the State's Peace.  I hope you

take all that in.  I hope you are absolutely clear in your own

mind about that."  I said:

"Oh, it will be nice to be good, sir."  But I had a real hor-

rorshow smeck at that inside, brothers.  He said:

"It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321.  It may be

horrible to be good.  And when I say that to you I realize how

self-contradictory that sounds.  I know I shall have many

sleepless nights about this.  What does God want?  Does God

want woodness or the choice of goodness?  Is a man who

chooses the bad perhaps in some ways better than a man who

has the good imposed upon him?  Deep and hard questions,

little 6655321.  But all I want to say to you now is this:  if at

any time in the future you look back to these times and re-

member me, the lowest and humblest of all God's servitors,

do not, I pray, think evil of me in your heart, thinking me in

any way involved in what is now about to happen to you.  And

now, talking of praying, I realize sadly that there will be little

point in praying for you.  You are passing now to a region

where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.  A

terrible terrible thing to consider.  And yet, in a sense, in

choosing to be deprive of the ability to make an ethical

choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.  So I shall

like to think.  So, God help us all, 6655321, I shall like to

think."  And then he began to cry.  But I didn't really take much

notice of that, brothers only having a bit of a quiet smeck

inside, because you could viddy that he had been peeting away

at the old whisky, and now he took a bottle from a cupboard

in his desk and started to pour himself a real horrorshow

bolshy slog into a very greasy and grahzny glass.  He downed

it and the said: "All may be well, who knows?  God works in a

mysterious way."  Then he began to sing away at a hymn in a

real loud rich goloss.  Then the door opened and the chassos

came in to tolchock me back to my vonny cell, but the old

charles still went on singing this hymn.

Well, the next morning I had to say good-bye to the old

Staja, and I felt a malenky bit sad as you always will when you

have to leave a place you've like got used to.  But I didn't go

very far, O my brothers.  I was punched and kicked along to

the new white building just beyond the yard where we used to

do our bit of exercise.  This was a very new building and it had

a new cold like sizy smell which gave you a bit of the shivers.  I

stood there in the horrible bolshy bare hall and I got new

vons, sniffing away there with my like very sensitive morder or

sniffer.  These were like hospital vons, and the chelloveck the

chassos handed me over to had a white coat on, as he might

be a hospital man.  He signed for me, and one of the brutal

chassos who had brought nme said: "You watch this one, sir.  A

right brutal bastard he has been and will be again, in spite of

all his sucking up to the Prison Chaplain and reading the

Bible."  But this new chelloveck had real horrorshow blue glaz-

zies which like smiled when he govoreeted.  He said:

"Oh, we don't anticipate any trouble.  We're going to be

friends, aren't we?"  And he smiled with his glazzies and his fine

big rot which was full of shining white zoobies and I sort of

took to this veck right away.  Anyway, he passed me on to a

like lesser veck in a white coat, and this one was very nice

too, and I was led off to a very nice white clean bedroom with

curtains and a bedside lamp, and just the one bed in it, all for

Your Humble Narrator.  So I had a real horrorshow inner

smeck at that, thinking I was really a very lucky young mal-

chickiwick.  I was told to take off my horrible prison platties

and I was given a really beautiful set of pyjamas, O my

brothers, in plain green, the heighth of bedwear fashion.  And I

was given a nice warm dressing-gown too and lovely toofles

to put my bare nogas in, and I thought: "Well, Alex boy, little

6655321 as was, you have copped it lucky and no mistake.

You are really going to enjoy it here."

After I had been given a nice chasha of real horrorshow

coffee and some old gazettas and mags to look at while peet-

ing it, this first veck in white came in, the one who had like

signed for me, and he said: "Aha, there you are," a silly sort of

a veshch to say but it didn't sound silly, this veck being so like

nice.  "My name," he said, "is Dr. Branom.  I'm Dr. Brodsky's

assistant.  With your permission, I'll just give you the usual

brief overall examination."  And he took the old stetho out of

his right carman.  "We must make sure you're quite fit, mustn't

we?  Yes indeed, we must."  So while I lay there with my pyjama

top off and he did this, that and the other, I said:

"What exactly is it, sir, that you're going to do?"

"Oh," said Dr. Branom, his cold stetho going all down my

back, "it's quite simple, really.  We just show you some films."

"Films?" I said.  I could hardly believe my ookos, brothers,

as you may well understand.  "You mean," I said, "it will be just

like going to the pictures?"

"They'll be special films," said Dr. Branom.  "Very special

films.  You'll be having the first session this afternoon.  Yes," he

said, getting up from bending over me, "you seem to be quite a

fit young boy.  A bit under-nourished perhaps.  That will be the

fault of the prison food.  Put your pyjama top back on.  After

every meal," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed, "we shall be

giving you a shot in the arm.  That should help."  I felt really

grateful to this very nice Dr. Branom.  I said:

"Vitamins, sir, will it be?"

"Something like that," he said, smiling real horrorshow and

friendly, "just a jab in the arm after every meal."  Then he went

out.  I lay on the bed thinking this was like real heaven, and I

read some of the mags they'd given me - 'Worldsport', 'Sinny'

(this being a film mag) and 'Goal'.  Then I lay back on the bed

and shut my glazzies and thought how nice it was going to be

out there again, Alex with perhaps a nice easy job during the

day, me being now too old for the old skolliwoll, and then

perhaps getting a new like gang together for the nochy, and

the first rabbit would be to get old Dim and Pete, if they had

not been got already by the millicents.  This time I would be

very careful not to get loveted.  They were giving another like

chance, me having done murder and all, and it would not be

like fair to get loveted again, after going to all this trouble to

show me films that were going to make me a real good mal-

chick.  I had a real horrorshow smeck at everybody's like

innocence, and I was smecking my gulliver off when they

brought in my lunch on a tray.  The veck who brought it was

the one who'd led me to this malenky bedroom when I came

into the mesto, and he said:

"It's nice to know somebody's happy."  It was really a very

nice appetizing bit of pishcha they'd laid out on the tray - two

or three lomticks of like hot roastbeef with mashed kartoffel

and vedge, then there was also ice-cream and a nice hot

chasha of chai.  And there was even a cancer to smoke and a

matchbox with one match in.  So this looked like it was the

life, O my brothers.  Then, about half an hour after while I was

lying a bit sleepy on the bed, a woman nurse came in, a real

nice young devotchka with real horrorshow groodies (I had

not seen such for two years) and she had a tray and a hypo-

dermic.  I said:

"Ah, the old vitamins, eh?"  And I clickclicked at her but she

took no notice.  All she did was to slam the needle into my

left arm, and then swishhhh in went the vitamin stuff.  Then she

went out again, clack clack on her high-heeled nogas.  Then

the white-coated veck who was like a male nurse came in with

a wheelchair.  I was a malenky bit surprised to viddy that.  I

said:

"What giveth then, brother?  I can walk, surely, to wherever

we have to itty to."  But he said:

"Best I push you there."  And indeed, O my brothers, when I

got off the bed I found myself a malenky biy weak.  It was the

under-nourishment like Dr. Branom had said, all that horrible

prison pishcha.  But the vitamins in the after-meal injection

would put me right.  No doubt at all about that, I thought.

4

Where I was wheeled to, brothers, was like no sinny I had ever

viddied before.  True enough, one wall was all covered with

silver screen, and direct opposite was a wall with square holes

in for the projector to project through, and there were stereo

speakers stuck all over the mesto.  But against the right-hand

one of the other walls was a bank of all like little meters, and

in the middle of the floor facing the screen was like a dentist's

chair with all lengths of wire running from it, and I had to like

crawl from the wheelchair to this, being given some help by

another like male nurse veck in a white coat.  Then I noticed

that underneath the projection holes was like all frosted glass

and I thought I viddied shadows of like people moving behind

it and I thought I slooshied somebody cough kashl kashl

kashl.  But then all I could like notice was how weak I seemed

to be, and I put that down to changing over from prison

pishcha to this new rich pishcha and the vitamins injected into

me.  "Right," said the wheelchair-wheeling veck, "now I'll leave

you.  The show will commence as soon as Dr. Brodsky arrives.

Hope you enjoy it."  To be truthful, brothers, I did not really

feel that I wanted to viddy any film-show this afternoon.  I was

just not in the mood.  I would have liked much better to have

a nice quiet spatchka on the bed, nice and quiet and all on my

oddy knocky.  I felt very limp.

What happened now was that one white-coated veck

strapped my gulliver to a like head-rest, singing to himself all

the time some vonny cally pop-song.  "What's this for?" I said.

And this veck replied, interrupting his like song an instant,

that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me look at the

screen.  "But," I said, "I want to look at the screen.  I've been

brought here to viddy films and viddy films I shall."  And then

the other white-coat veck (there were three altogether, one

of them a devotchka who was like sitting at the bank of

meters and twiddling with knobs) had a bit of a smeck at that.

He said:

"You never know.  Oh, you never know.  Trust us, friend.  It's

better this way."  And then I found they were strapping my

rookers to the chair-arms and my nogas were like stuck to a

foot-rest.  It seemed a bit bezoomny to me but I let them get

on with what they wanted to get on with.  If I was to be a free

young malchick again in a fortnight's time I would put up with

much in the meantime, O my brothers.  One veshch I did not

like, though, was when they put like clips on the skin of my

forehead, so that my top glazz-lids were pulled up and up and

up and I could not shut my glazzies no matter how I tried.  I

tried to smeck and said: "This must be a real horrorshow film

if you're so keen on my viddying it."  And one of the white-

coat vecks said, smecking:

"Horrorshow is right, friend.  A real show of horrors."  And

then I had like a cap stuck on my gulliver and I could viddy

all wires running away from it, and they stuck a like suction

pad on my belly and one on the old tick-tocker, and I could

just about viddy wires running away from those.  Then there

was the shoom of a door opening and you could tell some

very important chelloveck was coming in by the way the

white-coated under-vecks went all stiff.  And then I viddied this

Dr. Brodsky.  He was a malenky veck, very fat, with all curly

hair curling all over his gulliver, and on his spuddy nose he

had very thick ochkies.  I could just viddy that he had a real

horrorshow suit on, absolutely the heighth of fashion, and he

had a like very delicate and subtle von of operating-theatres

coming from him.  With him was Dr. Branom, all smiling like as

though to give me confidence.  "Everything ready?" said Dr.

Brodsky in a very breathy goloss.  Then I could slooshy voices

saying Right right right from like a distance, then nearer to,

then there was a quiet like humming shoom as though things

had been switched on.  And then the lights went out and there

was Your Humble Narrator And Friend sitting alone in the

dark, all on his frightened oddy knocky, not able to move nor

shut his glazzies nor anything.  And then, O my brothers, the

film-show started off with some very gromky atmosphere

music coming from the speakers, very fierce and full of dis-

cord.  And then on the screen the picture came on, but there

was no title and no credits.  What came on was a street, as it

might have been any street in any town, and it was a real dark

nochy and the lamps were lit.  It was a very good like pro-

fessional piece of sinny, and there were none of these flickers

and blobs you get, say, when you viddy one of these dirty

films in somebody's house in a back street.  All the time the

music bumped out, very like sinister.  And then you could

viddy an old man coming down the street, very starry, and

then there leaped out on this starry veck two malchicks

dressed in the heighth of fashion, as it was at this time (still

thin trousers but no like cravat any more, more of a real tie),

and then they started to filly with him.  You could slooshy the

screams and moans, very realistic, and you could even get the

like heavy breathing and panting of the two tolchocking mal-

chicks.  They made a real pudding out of this starry veck, going

crack crack crack at him with the fisty rookers, tearing his

platties off and then finishing up by booting his nagoy plott

(this lay all krovvy-red in the grahzny mud of the gutter) and

then running off very skorry.  Then there was the close-up

gulliver of this beaten-up starry veck, and the krovvy flowed

beautiful red.  It's funny how the colours of the like real

world only seem really real when you viddy them on the

screen.

Now all the time I was watching this I was beginning to get

very aware of a like not feeling all that well, and this I put

down to the under-nourishment and my stomach not quite

ready for tthe rich pishcha and vitamins I was getting here.  But

I tried to forget this, concentrating on the next film which

came on at once, brothers, without any break at all.  This

time the film jumped right away on a young devotchka who

was being given the old in-out by first one malchick then

another then another then another, she creeching away very

gromky through the speakers and like very pathetic and tragic

music going on at the same time.  This was real, very real,

though if you thought about it properly you couldn't imagine

lewdies actually agreeing to having all this done to them in a

film, and if these films were made by the Good or the State

you couldn't imagine them being allowed to take these films

without like interfering with what was going on.  So it must

have been very clever what they call cutting or editing or

some such veshch.  For it was very real.  And when it came to

the sixth or seventh malchick leering and smecking and then

going into it and the devotchka creeching on the sound-track

like bezoomny, then I began to feel sick.  I had like pains all

over and felt I could sick up and at the same time not sick up,

and I began to feel like in distress, O my brothers, being fixed

rigid too on this chair.  When this bit of film was over I could

slooshy the goloss of this Dr. Brodsky from over by the

switchboard saying: "Reaction about twelve point five?  Prom-

ising, promising."

Then we shot straight into another lomtick of film, and this

time it was of just a human litso, a very like pale human face

held still and having different nasty veshches done to it.  I was

sweating a malenky bit with the pain in my guts and a horrible

thirst and my gulliver going throb throb throb, and it seemed

to me that if I could not viddy this bit of film I would perhaps

be not so sick.  But I could not shut my glazzies, and even if I

tried to move my glaz-balls about I still could not get like out

of the line of fire of this picture.  So I had to go on viddying

what was being done and hearing the most ghastly creechings

coming from this litso.  I knew it could not really be real, but

that made no difference.  I was heaving away but could not

sick, viddying first a britva cut out an eye, then slice down the

cheek, then go rip rip rip all over, while red krovvy shot on to

the camera lens.  Then all the teeth were like wrenched out

with a pair of pliers, and the creeching and the blood were

terrific.  Then I slooshied this very pleased goloss of Dr.

Brodsky going: "Excellent, excellent, excellent."

The next lomtick of film was of an old woman who kept a

shop being kicked about amid very gromky laughter by a lot

of malchicks, and these malchicks broke up the shop and then

set fire to it.  You could viddy this poor starry ptitsa trying to

crawl out of the flames, screaming and creeching, but having

had her leg broke by these malchicks kicking her she could

not move.  So then all the flames went roaring round her, and

you could viddy her agonized litso like appealing through the

flames and the disappearing in the flames, and then you

could slooshy the most gromky and agonized and agonizing

screams that ever came from a human goloss.  So this time I

knew I had to sick up, so I creeched:

"I want to be sick.  Please let me be sick.  Please bring some-

thing for me to be sick into."  But this Dr. Brodsky called back:

"Imagination only.  You've nothing to worry about.  Next

film coming up."  That was perhaps meant to be a joke, for I

heard a like smeck coming from the dark.  And then I was

forced to viddy a most nasty film about Japanese torture.  It

was the 1939-45 War, and there were soldiers being fixed to

trees with nails and having fires lit under them and having their

yarbles cut off, and you even viddied a gulliver being sliced off

a soldier with a sword, and then with his head rolling about

and the rot and glazzies looking alive still, the plott of this

soldier actually ran about, krovvying like a fountain out of

the neck, and then it dropped, and all the time there was very

very loud laughter from the Japanese.  The pains I felt now in

my belly and the headache and the thirst were terrible, and

they all seemed to be coming out of the screen.  So I

creeched:

"Stop the film!  Please, please stop it!  I can't stand any

more."  And then the goloss of this Dr. Brodsky said:

"Stop it?  Stop it, did you say?  Why, we've hardly started."

And he and the others smecked quite loud.

5

I do not wish to describe, brothers, what other horrible vesh-

ches I was like forced to viddy that afternoon.  The like

minds of this Dr. Brodsky and Dr. Branom and the others in

white coats, and remember there was this devotchka twid-

dling with the knobs and watching the meters, they must have

been more cally and filthy than any prestoopnick in the Staja

itself.  Because I did not think it was possible for any veck to

even think of making films of what I was forced to viddy, all

tied to this chair and my glazzies made to be wide open.  All I

could do was to creech very gromky for them to turn it off,

turn it off, and that like part drowned the noise of dratsing

and fillying and also the music that went with it all.  You can

imagine it was like a terrible relief when I'd viddied the last bit

of film, and this Dr. Brodsky said, in a very yawny and bored

like goloss: "I think that should be enough for Day One, don't

you, Branom?"  And there I was with the lights switched on,

my gulliver throbbing like a bolshy big engine that makes

pain, and my rot all dry and cally inside, and feeling I could

like sick up every bit of pishcha I had ever eaten, O my

brothers, since the day I was like weaned.  "All right," said this

Dr. Brodsky, "he can be taken back to his bed."  Then he like

patted me on the pletcho and said: "Good, good.  A very

promising start," grinning all over his litso, then he like

waddled out, Dr. Branom after him, but Dr. Branom gave me a

like very droogy and sympathetic type smile as though he had

nothing to do with all this veshch but was like forced into it

as I was.

Anyhow, they freed my plott from the chair and they let go

the skin above my glazzies so that I could open and shut them

again, and I shut them, O my brothers, with the pain and throb

in my gulliver, and then I was like carried to the old wheel-

chair and taken back to my malenky bedroom, the under-veck

who wheeled me singing away at some hound-and-horny

popsong so that I like snarled: "Shut it, thou," but he only

smecked and said: "Never mind, friend," and then sang louder.

So I was put into the bed and still felt bolnoy but could not

sleep, but soon I started to feel that soon I might start to feel

that I might soon start feeling just a malenky bit better, and

then I was brought some nice hot chai with plenty of moloko

and sakar and, peeting that, I knew that that like horrible

nightmare was in the past and all over.  And then Dr. Branom

came in, all nice and smiling.  He said:

"Well, by my calculations you should be starting to feel all

right again.  Yes?"

"Sir," I said, like wary.  I did not quite kopat what he was

getting at govoreeting about calculations, seeing that getting

better from feeling bolnoy is like your own affair and nothing

to do with calculations.  He sat down, all nice and droogy, on

the bed's edge and said:

"Dr. Brodsky is pleased with you.  You had a very positive

response.  Tomorrow, of course, there'll be two sessions,

morning and afternoon, and I should imagine that you'll be

feeling a bit limp at the end of the day.  But we have to be hard

on you, you have to be cured."  I said:

"You mean I have to sit through - ?  You mean I have to

look at - ?  Oh, no," I said.  "It was horrible."

"Of course it was horrible," smiled Dr. Branom.  "Violence is a

very horrible thing.  That's what you're learning now.  Your

body is learning it."

"But," I said, "I don't understand.  I don't understand about

feeling sick like I did.  I never used to feel sick before.  I used to

feel like very the opposite.  I mean, doing it or watching it I

used to feel real horrorshow.  I just don't understand why or

how or what - "

"Life is a very wonderful thing," said Dr. Branom in a like

very holy goloss.  "The processes of life, the make-up of the

human organism, who can fully understand these miracles?  Dr.

Brodsky is, of course, a remarkable man.  What is happening

to you now is what should happen to any normal healthy

human organism contemplating the actions of the forces of

evil, the workings of the principle of destruction.  You are

being made sane, you are being made healthy."

"That I will not have," I said, "nor can understand at all.

What you've been doing is to make me feel very ill."

"Do you feel ill now?" he said, still with the old droogy

smile on his litso.  "Drinking tea, resting, having a quiet chat

with a friend - surely you're not feeling anything but well?"

I like listened and felt for pain and sickness in my gulliver

and plott, in a like cautious way, but it was true, brothers,

that I felt real horrorshow and even wanting my dinner.  "I

don't get it," I said.  "You must be doing something to me to

make me feel ill."  And I sort of frowned about that, thinking.

"You felt ill this afternoon," he said, "because you're getting

better.  When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the

hateful with fear and nausea.  You're becoming healthy, that's

all.  You'll be healthier still this time tomorrow."  Then he

patted me on the noga and went out, and I tried to puzzle the

whole veshch out as best I could.  What it seemed to me was

that the wire and other veshches that were fixed to my plott

perhaps were making me feel ill, and that it was all a trick

really.  I was still puzzling out all this and wondering whether I

should refuse to be strapped down to this chair tomorrow

and start a real bit of dratsing with them all, because I had my

rights, when another chelloveck came in to see me.  He was a

like smiling starry veck who said he was what he called the

Discharge Officer, and he carried a lot of bits of paper with

him.  He said:

"Where will you go when you leave here?"  I hadn't really

thought about that sort of veshch at all, and it only now

really began to dawn on me that I'd be a fine free malchick

very soon, and then I viddied that would only be if I played it

everybody's way and did not start any dratsing and creeching

and refusing and so on.  I said:

"Oh, I shall go home.  Back to my pee and em."

"Your - ?"  He didn't get nadsat-talk at all, so I said:

"To my parents in the dear old flatblock."

"I see," he said.  "And when did you last have a visit from

your parents?"

"A month," I said, "very near.  They like suspended visiting-

day for a bit because of one prestoopnick getting some blast-

ing-powder smuggled in across the wires from his ptitsa.  A

real cally trick to play on the innocent, like punishing them as

well.  So it's near a month since I had a visit."

"I see," said this veck.  "And have your parents been informed

of your transfer and impending release?"  That had a real

lovely zvook that did, that slovo 'release'.  I said:

"No."  Then I said: "It will be a nice surprise for them, that,

won't it?  Me just walking in through the door and saying:

'Here I am, back, a free veck again.'  Yes, real horrorshow."

"Right," said the Discharge Officer veck, "we'll leave it at that.

So long as you have somewhere to live.  Now, there's the

question of your having a job, isn't there?"  And he showed me

this long list of jobs I could have, but I thought, well, there

would be time enough for that.  A nice malenky holiday first.  I

could do a crasting job soon as I got out and fill the old

carmans with pretty polly, but I would have to be very careful

and I would have to do the job all on my oddy knocky.  I did

not trust so-called droogs any more.  So I told this veck to

leave it a bit and we would govoreet about it again.  He said

right right right, then got ready to leave.  He showed himself

to be a very queer sort of a veck, because what he did now

was to like giggle and then say: "Would you like to punch me

in the face before I go?"  I did not think I could possibly have

slooshied that right, so I said:

"Eh?"

"Would you," he giggled, "like to punch me in the face

before I go?"  I frowned like at that, very puzzled, and said:

"Why?"

"Oh," he said, "just to see how you're getting on."  And he

brought his litso real near, a fat grin all over his rot.  So I

fisted up and went smack at this litso, but he pulled himself

away real skorry, grinning still, and my rooker just punched

air.  Very puzzling, this was, and I frowned as he left, smecking

his gulliver off.  And then, my brothers, I felt real sick again,

just like in the afternoon, just for a couple of minootas.  It

then passed off skorry, and when they brought my dinner in

I found I had a fair appetite and was ready to crunk away at

the roast chicken.  But it was funny that starry chelloveck

asking for a tolchock in the litso.  And it was funny feeling sick

like that.

What was even funnier was when I went to sleep that night,

O my brothers, I had a nightmare, and, as you might expect, it

was one of those bits of film I'd viddied in the afternoon.  A

dream or nightmare is really only like a film inside your gulli-

ver, except that it is as though you could walk into it and be

part of it.  And this is what happened to me.  It was a nightmare

of one of the bits of film they showed me near the end of the

afternoon like session, all of smecking malchicks doing the

ultra-violent on a young ptitsa who was creeching away in her

red red krovvy, her platties all razrezzed real horrorshow.  I

was in this fillying about, smecking away and being like the

ring-leader, dressed in the heighth of nadsat fashion.  And then

at the heighth of all this dratsing and tolchocking I felt like

paralysed and wanting to be very sick, and all the other mal-

chicks had a real gromky smeck at me.  Then I was dratsing my

way back to being awake all through my own krovvy, pints

and quarts and gallons of it, and then I found myself in my bed

in this room.  I wanted to be sick, so I got out of the bed all

trembly so as to go off down the corridor to the old vaysay.

But, behold, brothers, the door was locked.  And turning

round I viddied for like the first raz that there were bars on

the window.  And so, as I reached for the like pot in the mal-

enky cupboard beside the bed, I viddied that there would be

no escaping from any of all this.  Worse, I did not dare to go

back into my own sleeping gulliver.  I soon found I did not

want to be sick after all, but then I was poogly of getting back

into bed to sleep.  But soon I fell smack into sleep and did not

dream any more.

6

"Stop it, stop it, stop it," I kept on creeching out.  "Turn it off

you grahzny bastards, for I can stand no more."  It was the

next day, brothers, and I had truly done my best morning and

afternoon to play it their way and sit like a horrorshow smil-

ing cooperative malchick in their chair of torture while they

flashed nasty bits of ultra-violence on the screen, my glazzies

clipped open to viddy all, my plott and rookers and nogas

fixed to the chair so I could not get away.  What I was being

made to viddy now was not really a veshch I would have

thought to be too bad before, it being only three or four

malchicks crasting in a shop and filling their carmans with

cutter, at the same time fillying about with the creeching

starry ptitsa running the shop, tolchocking her and letting the

red red krovvy flow.  But the throb and like crash crash crash

in my gulliver and the wanting to be sick and the terrible dry

rasping thirstiness in my rot, all were worse than yesterday.

"Oh.  I've had enough" I cried.  "It's not fair, you vonny sods,"

and I tried to struggle out of the chair but it was not possible

me being as good as stuck to it.

"First-class," creeched out this Dr. Brodsky.  "You're doing

really well.  Just one more and then we're finished."

What it was now was the starry 1939-45 War again, and it

was a very blobby and liny and crackly film you could viddy

had been made by the Germans.  It opened with German eagles

and the Nazi flag with that like crooked cross that all mal-

chicks at school love to draw, and then there were very

haughty and nadmenny like German officers walking through

streets that were all dust and bomb-holes and broken build-

ings.  Then you were allowed to viddy lewdies being shot

against walls, officers giving the orders, and also horrible

nagoy plotts left lying in gutters, all like cages of bare ribs and

white thin nogas.  Then there were lewdies being dragged off

creeching though not on the sound-track, my brothers, the

only sound being music, and being tolchocked while they

were dragged off.  Then I noticed, in all my pain and sickness,

what music it was that like crackled and boomed on the

sound-track, and it was Ludwig van, the last movement of the

Fifth Symphony, and I creeched like bezoomny at that.  "Stop!"

I creeched.  "Stop, you grahzny disgusting sods.  It's a sin, that's

what it is, a filthy unforgivable sin, you bratchnies!"  They

didn't stop right away, because there was only a minute or

two more to go - lewdies being beaten up and all krovvy, then

more firing squads, then the old Nazi flag and THE END.  But

when the lights came on this Dr. Brodsky and also Dr. Branom

were standing in front of me, and Dr. Brodsky said:

"What's all this about sin, eh?"

"That," I said, very sick.  "Using Ludwig van like that.  He did

no harm to anyone.  Beethoven just wrote music."  And then I

was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the

shape of like a kidney.

"Music," said Dr. Brodsky, like musing.  "So you're keen on

music.  I know nothing about it myself.  It's a useful emotional

heightener, that's all I know.  Well, well.  What do you think

about that, eh, Branom?"

"It can't be helped," said Dr. Branom.  "Each man kills the

thing he loves, as the poet-prisoner said.  Here's the pun-

ishment element, perhaps.  The Governor ought to be

pleased."

"Give me a drink," I said, "for Bog's sake."

"Loosen him," ordered Dr. Brodsky.  "Fetch him a carafe of

ice-cold water."  So then these under-vecks got to work and

soon I was peeting gallons and gallons of water and it was

like heaven, O my brothers.  Dr. Brodsky said:

"You seem a sufficiently intelligent young man.  You seem,

too, to be not without taste.  You've just got this violence

thing, haven't you?  Violence and theft, theft being an aspect

of violence."  I didn't govoreet a single slovo, brothers, I was

still feeling sick, though getting a malenky bit better now.  But

it had been a terrible day.  "Now then," said Dr. Brodsky, "how

do you think this is done?  Tell me, what do you think we're

doing to you?"

"You're making me feel ill.  I'm ill when I look at those filthy

pervert films of yours.  But it's not really the films that's doing

it.  But I feel that if you'll stop these films I'll stop feeling ill."

"Right," said Dr. Brodsky.  "It's association, the oldest edu-

cational method in the world.  And what really causes you to

feel ill?"

"These grahzny sodding veshches that come out of my gulli-

ver and my plott," I said, "that's what it is."

"Quaint," said Dr. Brodsky, like smiling, "the dialect of the

tribe.  Do you know anything of its provenance, Branom?"

"Odd bits of old rhyming slang," said Dr. Branom, who did

not look quite so much like a friend any more.  "A bit of gipsy

talk, too.  But most of the roots are Slav.  Propaganda.  Sub-

liminal penetration."

"All right, all right, all right," said Dr. Brodsky, like impatient

and not interested any more.  "Well," he said to me, "it isn't the

wires.  It's nothing to do with what's fastened to you.  Those

are just for measuring your reactions.  What is it, then?"

I viddied then, of course, what a bezoomny shoot I was not

to notice that it was the hypodermic shots in the rooker.

"Oh," I creeched, "oh, I viddy all now.  A filthy cally vonny

trick.  An act of treachery, sod you, and you won't do it

again."

"I'm glad you've raised your objections now," said Dr.

Brodsky.  "Now we can be perfectly clear about it.  We can get

this stuff of Ludovico's into your system in many different

ways.  Orally, for instance.  But the subcutaneous method is the

best.  Don't fight against it, please.  There's no point in your

fighting.  You can't get the better of us."

"Grahzny bratchnies," I said, like snivelling.  Then I said: "I

don't mind about the ultra-violence and all that cal.  I put up

with that.  But it's not fair on the music.  It's not fair I should

feel ill when I'm slooshying lovely Ludwig van and G. F. Handel

and others.  All that shows you're an evil lot of bastards and I

shall never forgive you, sods."

They both looked a bit like thoughtful.  Then Dr. Brodsky

said: "Delimitation is always difficult.  The world is one, life is

one.  The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in

some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance;

music, for instance.  You must take your chance, boy.  The

choice has been all yours."  I didn't understand all these slovos,

but now I said:

"You needn't take it any further, sir."  I'd changed my tune a

malenky bit in my cunning way.  "You've proved to me that all

this dratsing and ultra-violence and killing is wrong wrong

and terribly wrong.  I've learned my lesson, sirs.  I see now

what I've never seen before.  I'm cured, praise God."  And I

raised my glazzies in a like holy way to the ceiling.  But both

these doctors shook their gullivers like sadly and Dr. Brodsky

said:

"You're not cured yet.  There's still a lot to be done.  Only

when your body reacts promptly and violently to violence, as

to a snake, without further help from us, without medication,

only then - "  I said:

"But, sir, sirs, I see that it's wrong.  It's wrong because it's

against like society, it's wrong because every veck on earth

has the right to live and be happy without being beaten and

tolchocked and knifed.  I've learned a lot, oh really I have."

But Dr. Brodsky had a loud long smeck at that, showing all his

white zoobies, and said:

"The heresy of an age of reason," or some such slovos.  "I

see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.  No, no,

my boy, you must leave it all to us.  But be cheerful about it.  It

will soon be all over.  In less than a fortnight now you'll be a

free man."  Then he patted me on the pletcho.

Less than a fortnight, O my brothers and friends, it was like

an age.  It was like from the beginning of the world to the end

of it.  To finish the fourteen years without remission in the

Staja would have been nothing to it.  Every day it was the

same.  When the devotchka with the hypodermic came round,

though, four days after this govoreeting with Dr. Brodsky and

Dr. Branom, I said: "Oh, no you won't," and tolchocked her on

the rooker, and the syringe went tinkle clatter on to the

floor.  That was like to viddy what they would do.  What they

did was to get four or five real bolshy white-coated bastards

of under-vecks to hold me down on the bed, tolchocking me

with grinny litsos close to mine, and then this nurse ptitsa

said: "You wicked naughty little devil, you," while she jabbed

my rooker with another syringe and squirted this stuff in real

brutal and nasty.  And then I was wheeled off exhausted to this

like hell sinny as before.

Every day, my brothers, these films were like the same, all

kicking and tolchocking and red red krovvy dripping off of

litsos and plotts and spattering all over the camera lenses.  It

was usually grinning and smecking malchicks in the heighth of

nadsat fashion, or else teeheeheeing Jap torturers or brutal

Nazi kickers and shooters.  And each day the feeling of want-

ing to die with the sickness and gulliver pains and aches in the

zoobies and horrible horrible thirst grew really worse.  Until

one morning I tried to defeat the bastards by crash crash

crashing my gulliver against the wall so that I should tolchock

myself unconscious, but all that happened was I felt sick with

viddying that this kind of violence was like the violence in the

films, so I was just exhausted and was given the injection and

was wheeled off like before.

And then there came a morning when I woke up and had my

breakfast of eggs and toast and jam and very hot milky chai,

and then I thought: "It can't be much longer now.  Now must

be very near the end of the time.  I have suffered to the

heighths and cannot suffer any more."  And I waited and

waited, brothers, for this nurse ptitsa to bring in the syringe,

but she did not come.  And then the white-coated under-veck

came and said:

"Today, old friend, we are letting you walk."

"Walk?" I said.  "Where?"

"To the usual place," he said.  "Yes, yes, look not so aston-

ished.  You are to walk to the films, me with you of course.

You are no longer to be carried in a wheelchair."

"But," I said, "how about my horrible morning injection?"

For I was really surprised at this, brothers, they being so keen

on pushing this Ludovico veshch into me, as they said.  "Don't

I get that horrible sicky stuff rammed into my poor suffering

rooker any more?"

"All over," like smecked this veck.  "For ever and ever amen.

You're on your own now, boy.  Walking and all to the

chamber of horrors.  But you're still to be strapped down and

made to see.  Come on then, my little tiger."  And I had to put

my over-gown and toofles on and walk down the corridor to

the like sinny mesto.

Now this time, O my brothers, I was not only very sick but

very puzzled.  There it was again, all the old ultra-violence and

vecks with their gullivers smashed and torn krovvy-dripping

ptitsas creeching for mercy, the like private and individual

fillying and nastiness.  Then there were the prison-camps and

the Jews and the grey like foreign streets full of tanks and

uniforms and vecks going down in withering rifle-fire, this

being the public side of it.  And this time I could blame nothing

for me feeling sick and thirsty and full of aches except what I

was forced to viddy, my glazzies still being clipped open and

my nogas and plott fixed to the chair but this set of wires and

other veshches no longer coming out of my plott and gulli-

ver.  So what could it be but the films I was viddying that were

doing this to me?  Except, of course, brothers, that this Lu-

dovico stuff was like a vaccination and there it was cruising

about in my krovvy, so that I would be sick always for ever

and ever amen whenever I viddied any of this ultra-violence.

So now I squared my rot and went boo hoo hoo, and the

tears like blotted out what I was forced to viddy in like all

blessed runny silvery dewdrops.  But these white-coat

bratchnies were skorry with their tashtooks to wipe the tears

away, saying: "There there, wazzums all weepy-weepy den."

And there it was again all clear before my glazzies, these

Germans prodding like beseeching and weeping Jews - vecks

and cheenas and malchicks and devotchkas - into mestos

where they would all snuff it of poison gas.  Boo hoo hoo I

had to go again, and along they came to wipe the tears off,

very skorry, so I should not miss one solitary veshch of what

they were showing.  It was a terrible and horrible day, O my

brothers and only friends.

I was lying on the bed all alone that nochy after my dinner

of fat thick mutton stew and fruit-pie and ice-cream, and I

thought to myself: "Hell hell hell, there might be a chance for

me if I get out now."  I had no weapon, though.  I was allowed

no britva here, and I had been shaved every other day by a fat

bald-headed veck who came to my bed before breakfast, two

white-coated bratchnies standing by to viddy I was a good

non-violent malchick.  The nails on my rookers had been scis-

sored and filed real short so I could not scratch.  But I was still

skorry on the attack, though they had weakened me down,

brothers, to a like shadow of what I had been in the old free

days.  So now I got off the bed and went to the locked door

and began to fist it real horrorshow and hard, creeching at the

same time: "Oh, help help.  I'm sick, I'm dying.  Doctor doctor

doctor, quick.  Please.  Oh, I'll die, I shall.  Help."  My gorlo was

real dry and sore before anyone came.  Then I heard nogas

coming down the corridor and a like grumbling goloss, and

then I recognized the goloss of the white-coated veck who

brought me pishcha and like escorted me to my daily doom.

He like grumbled:

"What is it?  What goes on?  What's your little nasty game in

there?"

"Oh, I'm dying," I like moaned.  "Oh, I have a ghastly pain in

my side.  Appendicitis, it is.  Ooooooh."

"Appendy shitehouse," grumbled this veck, and then to my

joy, brothers, I could slooshy the like clank of keys.  "If you're

trying it little friend, my friends and me will beat and kick you

all through the night."  Then he opened up and brought in like

the sweet air of the promise of my freedom.  Now I was like

behind the door when he pushed it open, and I could viddy

him in the corridor light looking round for me puzzled.  Then

I raised my two fisties to tolchock him on the neck nasty, and

then, I swear, as I viddied him in advance lying moan-

ing or out out out and felt the like joy rise in my guts, it was

then that this sickness rose in me as it might be a wave and I

felt a horrible fear as if I was really going to die.  I like tottered

over to the bed going urgh urgh urgh, and the veck, who was

not in his white coat but an over-gown, viddied clear enough

what I had in mind for he said:

"Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it?  Learning all the time,

as you could say.  Come on, little friend, get up from that bed

and hit me.  I want you to, yes, really.  A real good crack across

the jaw.  Oh, I'm dying for it, really I am."  But all I could do,

brothers, was to just lay there sobbing boo hoo hoo.  "Scum,"

like sneered this veck now.  "Filth."  And he pulled me up by like

the scruff of my pyjama-top, me being very weak and limp,

and he raised and swung his right rooker so that I got a fair

old tolchock clean on the litso.  "That," he said, "is for getting

me out of my bed, you young dirt."  And he wiped his rookers

against each other swish swish and went out.  Crunch crunch

went the key in the lock.

And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then

was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get

the hit than give it.  If that veck had stayed I might even have

like presented the other cheek.

7

I could not believe, brothers, what I was told.  It seemed that I

had been in that vonny mesto for near ever and would be

there for near ever more.  But it had always been a fortnight

and now they said the fortnight was near up.  They said:

"Tomorrow, little friend, out out out."  And they made with

the old thumb, like pointing to freedom.  And then the white-

coated veck who had tolchocked me and who had still

brought me my trays of pishcha and like escorted me to my

everyday torture said: "But you still have one real big day in

front of you.  It's to be your passing-out day," and he had a

leery smeck at that.

I expected this morning that I would be ittying as usual to

the sinny mesto in my pyjamas and toofles and over-gown.

But no.  This morning I was given my shirt and underveshches

and my platties of the night and my horrorshow kick-boots,

all lovely and washed or ironed and polished.  And I was even

given my cut-throat britva that I had used in those old happy

days for fillying and dratsing.  So I gave with the puzzled frown

at this as I got dressed, but the white-coated under-veck just

like grinned and would govoreet nothing, O my brothers.

I was led quite kindly to the same old mesto, but there were

changes there.  Curtains had been drawn in front of the sinny

screen and the frosted glass under the projection holes was

no longer there, it having perhaps been pushed up or folded

to the sides like blinds or shutters.  And where there had been

just the noise of coughing kashl kashl kashl and like shadows

of the lewdies was now a real audience, and in this audience

there were litsos I knew.  There was the Staja Governor and

the holy man, the charlie or charles as he was called, and the

Chief Chasso and this very important and well-dressed chello-

veck who was the Minister of the Interior or Inferior.  All the

rest I did not know.  Dr. Brodsky and Dr. Branom were there,

though not now white-coated, instead they were dressed as

doctors would dress who were big enough to want to dress in

the heighth of fashion.  Dr. Branom just stood, but Dr. Brodsky

stood and govoreeted in a like learned manner to all the

lewdies assembled.  When he viddied me coming in he said:

"Aha.  At this stage, gentlemen, we introduce the subject him-

self.  He is, as you will percieve, fit and well nourished.  He

comes straight from a night's sleep and a good breakfast,

undrugged, unhypnotized.  Tomorrow we send him with

confidence out into the world again, as decent a lad as you

would meet on a May morning, inclined to the kindly word

and the helpful act.  What a change is here, gentlemen, from

the wretched hoodlum the State committed to unprofitable

punishment some two years ago, unchanged after two years.

Unchanged, do I say?  Not quite.  Prison taught him the false

smile, the rubbed hands of hypocrisy, the fawning greased

obsequious leer.  Other vices it taught him, as well as

confirming him in those he had long practised before.  But

gentlemen, enough of words.  Actions speak louder than.

Action now.  Observe, all."

I was a bit dazed by all this govoreeting and I was trying to

grasp in my mind that like all this was about me.  Then all the

lights went out and then there came on two like spotlights

shining from the projection-squares, and one of them was full

on Your Humble and Suffering Narrator.  And into the other

spotlight there walked a bolshy big chelloveck I had never

viddied before.  He had a lardy like litso and a moustache and

like strips of hair pasted over his near-bald gulliver.  He was

about thirty or forty or fifty, some old age like that, starry.

He ittied up to me and the spotlight ittied with him, and soon

the two spotlights had made like one big pool.  He said to me,

very sneery: "Hello, heap of dirt.  Pooh, you don't wash much,

judging from the horrible smell."  Then, as if he was like danc-

ing, he stamped on my nogas, left, right, then he gave me a

finger-nail flick on the nose that hurt like bezoomny and

brought the old tears to my glazzies then he twisted at my left

ooko like it was a radio dial.  I could slooshy titters and a

couple of real horrorshow hawhawhaws coming from like

the audience.  My nose and nogas and ear-hole stung and

pained like bezoomny, so I said:

"What do you do that to me for?  I've never done wrong to

you, brother."

"Oh," this veck said, "I do this" - flickedflicked nose again -

"and that" - twisted smarting ear-hole - "and the other" -

stamped nasty on right noga - "because I don't care for your

horrible type.  And if you want to do anything about it, start,

start, please do."  Now I knew that I'd have to be real skorry

and get my cut-throat britva out before this horrible killing

sickness whooshed up and turned the like joy of battle into

feeling I was going to snuff it.  But, O brothers, as my rooker

reached for the britva in my inside carman I got this like

picture in my mind's glazzy of this insulting chelloveck how-

ling for mercy with the red red krovvy all streaming out of his

rot, and hot after this picture the sickness and dryness and

pains were rushing to overtake, and I viddied that I'd have to

change the way I felt about this rotten veck very very skorry

indeed, so I felt in my carmans for cigarettes or for pretty

polly, and, O my brothers, there was not either of these

veshches, I said, like all howly and blubbery:

"I'd like to give you a cigarette, brother, but I don't seem to

have any."  This veck went:

"Wah wah.  Boohoohoo.  Cry, baby."  Then he flick-

flickflicked with his bolshy horny nail at my nose again, and I

could slooshy very loud smecks of like mirth coming from the

dark audience.  I said, real desperate, trying to be nice to this

insulting and hurtful veck to stop the pains and sickness

coming up:

"Please let me do something for you, please."  And I felt in

my carmans but could find only my cut-throat britva, so I

took this out and handed it to him and said: "Please take this,

please.  A little present.  Please have it."  But he said:

"Keep your stinking bribes to yourself.  You can't get round

me that way."  And he banged at my rooker and my cut-throat

britva fell on the floor.  So I said:

"Please, I must do something.  Shall I clean your boots?  Look,

I'll get down and lick them."  And, my brothers, believe it or

kiss my sharries, I got down on my knees and pushed my red

yahzick out a mile and half to lick his grahzny vonny boots.

But all this veck did was to kick me not too hard on the rot.

So then it seemed to me that it would not bring on the sick-

ness and pain if I just gripped his ankles with my rookers tight

round them and brought this grashzny bratchny down to the

floor.  So I did this and he got a real bolshy surprise, coming

down crack amid loud laughter from the vonny audience.  But

viddying him on the floor I could feel the whole horrible feel-

ing coming over me, so I gave him my rooker to lift him up

skorry and up he came.  Then just as he was going to give me

a real nasty and earnest tolchock on the litso Dr. Brodsky said:

"All right, that will do very well."  Then this horrible veck

sort of bowed and danced off like an actor while the lights

came up on me blinking and with my rot square for howling.

Dr. Brodsky said to the audience: "Our subject is, you see,

impelled towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled

towards evil.  The intention to act violently is accompanied by

strong feelings of physical distress.  To counter these the sub-

ject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude.  Any

questions?"

"Choice," rumbled a rich deep goloss.   I viddied it belonged

to the prison charlie.  "He has no real choice, has he?  Self-

interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act

of self-abasement.  Its insincerity was clearly to be seen.  He

ceases to be a wrongdoer.  He ceases also to be a creature

capable of moral choice."

"These are subtleties," like smiled Dr. Brodsky.  "We are not

concerned with motive, with the higher ethics.  We are con-

cerned only with cutting down crime - "

"And," chipped in this bolshy well-dressed Minister, "with

relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons."

"Hear hear," said somebody.

There was a lot of govoreeting and arguing then and I just

stood there, brothers, like completely ignored by all these

ignorant bratchnies, so I creeched out:

"Me, me, me.  How about me?  Where do I come into all

this?  Am I just some animal or dog?"  And that started

them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me.  So

I creeched louder, still creeching: "Am I just to be like a clock-

work orange?"  I didn't know what made me use those slovos,

brothers, which just came like without asking into my gulli-

ver.  And that shut all those vecks up for some reason for a

minoota or two.  Then one very thin starry professor type

chelloveck stood up, his neck like all cables carrying like

power from his gulliver to his plott, and he said:

"You have no cause to grumble, boy.  You made your choice

and all this is a consequence of your choice.  Whatever now

ensues is what you yourself have chosen."  And the prison

charlie creeched out:

"Oh, if only I could believe that."  And you could viddy the

Governor give him a look like meaning that he would not

climb so high in like Prison Religion as he thought he would.

Then loud arguing started again, and then I could slooshy the

slovo Love being thrown around, the prison charles himself

creeching as loud as any about Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear

and all that cal.  And now Dr. Brodsky said, smiling all over his

litso:

"I am glad, gentlemen, this question of Love has been

raised.  Now we shall see in action a manner of Love that was

thought to be dead with the Middle Ages."  And then the lights

went down and the spotlights came on again, one on your

poor and suffering Friend and Narrator, and into the other

there like rolled or sidled the most lovely young devotchka

you could ever hope in all your jeezny, O my brothers, to

viddy.  That is to say, she had real horrorshow groodies all of

which you could like viddy, she having on platties which came

down down down off her pletchoes.  And her nogas were like

Bog in His Heaven, and she walked like to make you groan in

your keeshkas, and yet her litso was a sweet smiling young

like innocent litso.  She came up towards me with the light like

it was the like light of heavenly grace and all that cal coming

with her, and the first thing that flashed into my gulliver was

that I would like to have her right down there on the floor

with the old in-out real savage, but skorry as a shot came the

sickness, like a like detective that had been watching round a

corner and now followed to make his grahzny arrest.  And

now the von of lovely perfume that came off her made me

want to think of starting to heave in my keeshkas, so I

knew I had to think of some new like way of thinking about

her before all the pain and thirstiness and horrible sickness

come over me real horrorshow and proper.  So I creeched out:

"O most beautiful and beauteous of devotchkas, I throw

like my heart at your feet for you to like trample all over.  If I

had a rose I would give it to you.  If it was all rainy and cally

now on the ground you could have my platties to walk on so

as not to cover your dainty nogas with filth and cal."  And as I

was saying all this, O my brothers, I could feel the sickness

like slinking back.  "Let me," I creeched out, "worship you and

be like your helper and protector from the wicked like world."

Then I thought of the right slovo and felt better for it, saying:

"Let me be like your true knight," and down I went again on

the old knees, bowing and like scraping.

And then I felt real shooty and dim, it having been like an

act again, for this devotchka smiled and bowed to the audi-

ence and like danced off, the lights coming up to a bit of

applause.  And the glazzies of some of these starry vecks in the

audience were like popping out at this young devotchka with

dirty and like unholy desire, O my brothers.

"He will be your true Christian," Dr. Brodsky was creeching

out, "ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified

rather than crucify, sick to the very heart at the thought even

of killing a fly."  And that was right, brothers, because when he

said that I thought of killing a fly and felt just that tiny bit

sick, but I pushed the sickness and pain back by thinking of the

fly being fed with bits of sugar and looked after like a bleeding

pet and all that cal.  "Reclamation," he creeched.  "Joy before

the Angels of God."

"The point is," this Minister of the Inferior was saying real

gromky, "that it works."

"Oh," the prison charlie said, like sighing, "it works all right,

God help the lot of us."

Part Three

1

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

That, my brothers, was me asking myself the next morning,

standing outside this white building that was like tacked on to

the old Staja, in my platties of the night of two years back in

the grey light of dawn, with a malenky bit of a bag with my

few personal veshches in and a bit of cutter kindly donated by

the vonny Authorities to like start me off in my new life.

The rest of the day before had been very tiring, what with

interviews to go on tape for the telenews and photographs

being took flash flash flash and more like demonstrations of

me folding up in the face of ultra-violence and all that embar-

rassing cal.  And then I had like fallen into the bed and then,as

it looked to me, been waked up to be told to get off out, to

itty off home, they did not want to viddy Your Humble Nar-

rator never not no more, O my brothers.  So there I was, very

very early in the morning, with just this bit of pretty polly in

my left carman, jingle-jangling it and wondering:

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

Some breakfast some mesto, I thought, me not having

eaten at all that morning, every veck being so anxious to

tolchock me off out to freedom.  A chasha of chai only I had

peeted.  This Staja was in a very like gloomy part of the town,

but there were malenky workers' caffs all around and I soon

found one of these, my brothers.  It was very cally and vonny,

with one bulb in the ceiling with fly-dirt like obscuring its bit

of light, and there were early rabbiters slurping away at chai

and horrible-looking sausages and slices of kleb which they

like wolfed, going wolf wolf wolf and then creeching for

more.  They were served by a very cally devotchka but with

very bolshy groodies on her, and some of the eating vecks

tried to grab her, going haw haw haw while she went he he he,

and the sight of them near made me want to sick, brothers.

But I asked for some toast and jam and chai very politely and

with my gentleman's goloss, then I sat in a dark corner to eat

and peet.

While I was doing this, a malenky little dwarf of a veck

ittied in, selling the morning's gazettas, a twisted and grahzny

prestoopnick type with thick glasses on with steel rims, his

platties like the colour of very starry decaying currant pudding.

I kupetted a gazetta, my idea being to get ready for plunging

back into normal jeezny again by viddying what was ittying on

in the world.  This gazetta I had seemed to be like a Govern-

ment gazetta, for the only news that was on the front page

was about the need for every veck to make sure he put the

Government back in again on the next General Election,

which seemed to be about two or three weeks off.  There were

very boastful slovos about what the Government had done,

brothers, in the last year or so, what with increased exports

and a real horrorshow foreign policy and improved social

services and all that cal.  But what the Government was really

most boastful about was the way in which they reckoned the

streets had been made safer for all peace-loving night-walking

lewdies in the last six months, what with better pay for the

police and the police getting like tougher with young hooli-

gans and perverts and burglars and all that cal.  Which inter-

essovatted Your Humble Narrator some deal.  And on the

second page of the gazetta there was a blurry like photograph

of somebody who looked very familiar, and it turned out to

be none other than me me me.  I looked very gloomy and like

scared, but that was really with the flashbulbs going pop pop

all the time.  What it said undrneath my picture was that here

was the first graduate from the new State Institute for Rec-

lamation of Criminal Types, cured of his criminal instincts in a

fortnight only, now a good law-fearing citizen and all that cal.

Then I viddied there was a very boastful article about this

Ludovico's Technique and how clever the Government was

and all that cal.  Then there was another picture of some veck I

thought I knew, and it was this Minister of the Inferior or

Interior.  It seemed that he had been doing a bit of boasting,

looking forward to a nice crime-free era in which there would

be no more fear of cowardly attacks from young hooligans

and perverts and burglars and all that cal.  So I went

arghhhhhh and threw this gazetta on the floor, so that it

covered up stains of spilled chai and horrible spat gobs from

the cally animals that used thus caff.

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

What it was going to be now, brothers, was homeways and

a nice surprise for dadada and mum, their only son and heir

back in the family bosom.  Then I could lay back on the bed in

my own malenky den and slooshy some lovely music, and at

the same time I could think over what to do now with my

jeezny.  The Discharge Officer had given me a long list the day

before of jobs I could try for, and he had telephoned to

different vecks about me, but I had no intention, my brothers,

of going off to rabbit right away.  A malenky bit of a rest first,

yes, and a quiet think on the bed to the sound of lovely

music.

And so the autobus to Center, and then the autobus to

Kingsley Avenue, the flats of Flatblock 18A being just near.

You will believe me, my brothers, when I say that my heart

was going clopclopclop with the like excitement.  All was very

quiet, it still being early winter morning, and when I ittied into

the vestibule of the flatblock there was no veck about, only

the nagoy vecks and cheenas of the Dignity of Labour.  What

surprised me, brothers, was the way that had been cleaned up,

there being no longer any dirty ballooning slovos from the

rots of the Dignified Labourers, not any dirty parts of the

body added to their naked plotts by dirty-minded pencilling

malchicks.  And what also surprised me was that the lift was

working.  It came purring down when I pressed the electric

knopka, and when I got in I was surprised again to viddy all

was clean inside the like cage.

So up I went to the tenth floor, and there I saw 10-8 as it

had been before, and my rooker trembled and shook as I

took out of my carman the little klootch I had for opening

up.  But I very firmly fitted the klootch in the lock and turned,

then opened up then went in, and there I met three pairs of

surprised and almost frightened glazzies looking at me, and it

was pee and em having their breakfast, but it was also another

veck that I had never viddied in my jeezny before, a bolshy

thick veck in his shirt and braces, quite at home, brothers,

slurping away at the milky chai and munchmunching at his

eggiweg and toast.  And it was this stranger veck who spoke

first, saying:

"Who are you, friend?  Where did you get hold of a key?

Out, before I push your face in.  Get out there and knock.

Explain your business, quick."

My dad and mum sat like petrified, and I could viddy they

had not yet read the gazetta, then I remembered that the ga-

zetta did not arrive till papapa had gone off to his work.  But

then mum said: "Oh, you've broken out.  You've escaped.

Whatever shall we do?  We shall have the police here, oh oh

oh.  Oh, you bad and wicked boy, disgracing us all like this."

And, believe it or kiss my sharries, she started to go boo hoo.

So I started to try and explain, they could ring up the Staja if

they wanted, and all the time this stranger veck sat there like

frowning and looking as if he could push my litso in with his

hairy bolshy beefy fist.  So I said:

"How about you answering a few, brother?  What are you

doing here and for how long?  I didn't like the tone of what

you said just then.  Watch it.  Come on, speak up."  He was a

working-man type veck, very ugly, about thirty or forty, and

he sat now with his rot open at me, not govoreeting one

single slovo.  Then my dad said:

"This is all a bit bewildering, son.  You should have let us

know you were coming.  We thought it would be at least

another five or six years before they let you out.  Not," he

said, and he said it very like gloomy, "that we're not very

pleased to see you again and a free man, too."

"Who is this?" I said.  "Why can't he speak up?  What's going

on in here?"

"This is Joe," said my mum.  "He lives here now.  The lodger,

that's what he is.  Oh, dear dear dear," she went.

"You," said this Joe.  "I've heard all about you, boy.  I know

what you've done, breaking the hearts of your poor grieving

parents.  So you're back, eh?  Back to make life a misery for

them once more, is that it?  Over my dead corpse you will,

because they've let me be more like a son to them than like a

lodger."  I could nearly have smecked loud at that if the old

razdraz within me hadn't started to wake up the feeling of

wanting to sick, because this veck looked about the same age

as my pee and em, and there he was like trying to put a son's

protecting rooker round my crying mum, O my brothers.

"So," I said, and I near felt like collapsing in all tears myself.

"So that's it, then.  Well, I give you five large minootas to clear

all your horrible cally veshches out of my room."  And I made

for this room, this veck being a malenky bit too slow to stop

me.  When I opened the door my heart cracked to the carpet,

because I viddied it was no longer like my room at all,

brothers.  All my flags had gone off the walls and this veck had

put up pictures of boxers, also like a team sitting smug with

folded rookers and silver like shield in front.  And then I vid-

died what else was missing.  My stereo and my disc-cupboard

were no longer there, nor was my locked treasure-chest that

contained bottles and drugs and two shining clean syringes.

"There's been some filthy vonny work going on here," I

creeched.  "What have you done with my own personal

veshches, you horrible bastard?"  This was to this Joe, but it was

my dad that answered, saying:

"That was all took away, son, by the police.  This new regu-

lation, see, about compensation for the victims."

I found it very hard not to be very ill, but my gulliver was

aching shocking and my rot was so dry that I had to take a

skorry swig from the milk-bottle on the table, so that this Joe

said: "Filthy piggish manners."  I said:

"But she died.  That one died."

"It was the cats, son," said my dad like sorrowful, "that were

left with nobody to look after them till the will was read, so

they had to have somebody in to feed them.  So the police

sold your things, clothes and all, to help with the looking

after of them.  That's the law, son.  But you were never much

of a one for following the law."

I had to sit down then, and this Joe said: "Ask permission

before you sit, you mannerless young swine," so I cracked

back skorry with a "Shut your dirty big fat hole, you," feeling

sick.  Then I tried to be all reasonable and smiling for my

health's sake like, so I said: "Well, that's my room, there's no

denying that.  This is my home also.  What suggestions have

you, my pee and em, to make?"  But they just looked very

glum, my mum shaking a bit, her litso all lines and wet with

like tears, and then my dad said:

"All this needs thinking about, son.  We can't very well just

kick Joe out, not just like that, can we?  I mean, Joe's here

doing a job, a contract it is, two years, and we made like an

arrangement, didn't we, Joe?  I mean son, thinking you were

going to stay in prison a long time and that room going beg-

ging."  He was a bit ashamed, you could viddy that from his

litso.  So I just smiled and like nodded, saying:

"I viddy all.  You got used to a bit of peace and you got

used to a bit of extra pretty polly.  That's the way it goes.

And your son has just been nothing but a terrible nuisance."

And then, my brothers, believe me or kiss my sharries, I

started to like cry, feeling very like sorry for myself.  So my

dad said:

"Well, you see, son, Joe's paid next month's rent already.  I

mean, whatever we do in the future we can't say to Joe to get

out, can we, Joe?"  This Joe said:

"It's you two I've got to think of, who've been like a father

and mother to me.  Would it be right or fair to go off and

leave you to the tender mercies of this young monster who

has been like no real son at all?  He's weeping now, but that's

his craft and artfulness.  Let him go off and find a room some-

where.  Let him learn the error of his ways and that a bad boy

like he's been doesn't deserve such a good mum and dad as

what he's had."

"All right," I said, standing up in all like tears still.  "I know

how things are now.  Nobody wants or loves me.  I've suffered

and suffered and suffered and everybody wants me to go on

suffering.  I know."

"You've made others suffer," said this Joe.  "It's only right

you should suffer proper.  I've been told everything that

you've done, sitting here at night round the family table, and

pretty shocking it was to listen to.  Made me real sick a lot of

it did."

"I wish," I said, "I was back in the prison.  Dear old Staja as it

was.  I'm ittying off now," I said.  "You won't ever viddy me no

more.  I'll make my own way, thank you very much.  Let it lie

heavy on your consciences."  My dad said:

"Don't take it like that, son," and my mum just went boo

hoo hoo, her litso all screwed up real ugly, and this Joe put

his rooker round her again, patting her and going there there

there like bezoomny.  And so I just sort of staggered to the

door and went out, leaving them to their horrible guilt, O my

brothers.

2

Ittying down the street in a like aimless sort of a way

brothers, in these night platties which lewdies like stared at as

I went by, cold too, it being a bastard cold winter day, all I felt

I wanted was to be away from all this and not have to

think any more about any sort of veshch at all.  So I got the

autobus to Center, then walked back to Taylor Place, and

there was the disc-bootick 'MELODIA' - I had used to favour

with my inestimable custom, O my brothers, and it looked

much the same sort of mesto as it always had, and walking in I

expected to viddy old Andy there, that bald and very very thin

helpful little veck from whom I had kupetted discs in the old

days.  But there was no Andy there now, brothers, only a

scream and a creech of nadsat (teenage, that is) malchicks and

ptitsas slooshying some new horrible popsong and dancing

to it as well, and the veck behind the counter not much more

than a nadsat himself, clicking his rooker-bones and smecking

like bezoomny.  So I went up and waited till he like deigned to

notice me, then I said:

"I'd like to hear a disc of the Mozart Number Forty."  I don't

know why that should have come into my gulliver, but it did.

The counter-veck said:

"Forty what, friend?"

I said: "Symphony.  Symphony Number Forty in G Minor."

"Ooooh," went one of the dancing nadsats, a malchick with

his hair all over his glazzies, "seemfunnah.  Don't it seem

funny?  He wants a seemfunnah."

I could feel myself growing all razdraz within, but I had to

watch that, so I like smiled at the veck who had taken over

Andy's place and at all the dancing and creeching nadsats.  This

counter-veck said: "You go into that listen-booth over there,

friend, and I'll pipe something through."

So I went over to the malenky box where you could sloo-

shy the discs you wanted to buy, and then this veck put a disc

on for me, but it wasn't the Mozart Forty, it was the Mozart

'Prague' - he seemingly having just picked up any Mozart he

could find on the shelf - and that should have started making

me real razdraz and I had to watch that for fear of the pain

and sickness, but what I'd forgotten was something I

shouldn't have forgotten and now made me want to snuff it.

It was that these doctor bratchnies had so fixed things that

any music that was like for the emotions would make me sick

just like viddying or wanting to do violence.  It was because all

those violence films had music with them.  And I remembered

especially that horrible Nazi film with the Beethoven Fifth,

last movement.  And now here was lovely Mozart made hor-

rible.  I dashed out of the shop with these nadsats smecking

after me and the counter-veck creeching: "Eh eh eh!"  But I

took no notice and went staggering almost like blind across

the road and round the corner to the Korova Milkbar.  I knew

what I wanted.

The mesto was near empty, it being still morning.  It looked

strange too, having been painted with all red mooing cows,

and behind the counter was no veck I knew.  But when I said:

"Milk plus, large," the veck with a like lean litso very newly

shaved knew what I wanted.  I took the large moloko plus to

one of the little cubies that were all around this mesto, there

being like curtains to shut them off from the main mesto, and

there I sat down in the plushy chair and sipped and sipped.

When I'd finished the whole lot I began to feel that things

were happening.  I had my glazzies like fixed on a malenky bit

of silver paper from a cancer packet that was on the floor, the

sweeping-up of this mesto not being all that horrorshow,

brothers.  This scrap of silver began to grow and grow and

grow and it was so like bright and fiery that I had to squint my

glazzies at it.  It got so big that it became not only this whole

cubie I was lolling in but like the whole Korova, the whole

street, the whole city.  Then it was the whole world, then it

was the whole everything, brothers, and it was like a sea

washing over every veshch that had ever been made or

thought of even.  I could sort of slooshy myself making

special sort of shooms and govoreeting slovos like 'Dear

dead idlewilds, rot not in variform guises' and all that cal.

Then I could like feel the vision beating up in all this silver,

and then there were colours like nobody had ever viddied

before, and then I could viddy like a group of statues a long

long long way off that was like being pushed nearer and

nearer and nearer, all lit up by very bright light from below

and above alike, O my brothers.  This group of statues was of

God or Bog and all His Holy Angels and Saints, all very bright

like bronze, with beards and bolshy great wings that waved

about in a kind of wind, so that they could not really be of

stone or bronze, really, and the eyes or glazzies like moved

and were alive.  These bolshy big figures came nearer and

nearer and nearer till they were like going to crush me down,

and I could slooshy my goloss going 'Eeeeee'.  And I felt I had

got rid of everything - platties, body, brain, name, the lot -

and felt real horrorshow, like in heaven.  Then there was the

shoom of like crumbling and crumpling, and Bog and the

Angels and Saints sort of shook their gullivers at me, as

though to govoreet that there wasn't quite time now but I

must try again, and then everything like leered and smecked

and collapsed and the big warm light grew like cold, and then

there I was as I was before, the empty glass on the table and

wanting to cry and feeling like death was the only answer to

everything.

And that was it, that was what I viddied quite clear was the

thing to do, but how to do it I did not properly know, never

having thought of that before, O my brothers.  In my little bag

of personal veshches I had my cut-throat britva, but I at once

felt very sick as I thought of myself going swishhhh at myself

and all my own red red krovvy flowing.  What I wanted was

not something violent but something that would make me

like just go off gentle to sleep and that be the end of Your

Humble Narrator, no more trouble to anybody any more.

Perhaps, i thought, if I ittied off to the Public Biblio around

the corner I might find some book on the best way of snuffing

it with no pain.  I thought of myself dead and how sorry every-

body was going to be, pee and em and that cally vonny Joe

who was a like usurper, and also Dr. Brodsky and Dr. Branom

and that Inferior Interior Minister and every veck else.  And the

boastful vonny Government too.  So out I scatted into the

winter, and it was afternoon now, near two o'clock, as I

could viddy from the bolshy Center timepiece, so that me

being in the land with the old moloko plus must have took

like longer than I thought.  I walked down Marghanita Boule-

vard and then turned into Boothby Avenue, then round the

corner again, and there was the Public Biblio.

It was a starry cally sort of a mesto that I could not re-

member going into since I was a very very malenky malchick,

no more than about six years old, and there were two parts of

it - one part to borrow books and one part to read in, full of

gazettas and mags and like the von of very starry old men

with their plotts stinking of like old age and poverty.  These

were standing at the gazetta stands all round the room,

sniffling and belching and govoreeting to themselves and

turning over the pages to read the news very sadly, or else

they were sitting at the tables looking at the mags or pre-

tending to, some of them asleep and one or two of them

snoring real gromky.  I couldn't remember what it was I

wanted at first, then I remembered with a bit of a shock that

I had ittied here to find out how to snuff it without pain, so I

goolied over to the shelf full of reference veshches.  There were

a lot of books, but there was none with a title, brothers, that

would really do.  There was a medical book that I took down,

but when I opened it it was full of drawings and photographs

of horrible wounds and diseases, and that made me want to

sick just a bit.  So I put that back and took down the big

book or Bible, as it was called, thinking that might give me

like comfort as it had done in the old Staja days (not so old

really, but it seemed a very very long time ago), and I staggered

over to a chair to read in it.  But all I found was about smiting

seventy times seven and a lot of Jews cursing and tolchocking

each other, and that made me want to sick, too.  So then I

near cried, so that a very starry ragged moodge opposite me

said:

"What is it, son?  What's the trouble?"

"I want to snuff it," I said.  "I've had it, that's what it is.  Life's

become too much for me."

A starry reading veck next to me said: "Shhhh," without

looking up from some bezoomny mag he had full of drawings

of like bolshy geometrical veshches.  That rang a bell some-

how.  This other moodge said:

"You're too young for that, son.  Why, you've got every-

thing in front of you."

"Yes," I said, bitter.  "Like a pair of false groodies."  This mag-

reading veck said: "Shhhh" again, looking up this time, and

something clocked for both of us.  I viddied who it was.  He

said, real gromky:

"I never forget a shape, by God.  I never forget the shape of

anything.  By God, you young swine, I've got you now."  Crys-

tallography, that was it.  That was what he'd been taking away

from the Biblio that time.  False teeth crunched up real hor-

rorshow.  Platties torn off.  His books razrezzed, all about

Crystallography.  I thought I had best get out of here real

skorry, brothers.  But this starry old moodge was on his feet,

creeching like bezoomny to all the starry old coughers at the

gazettas round the walls and to them dozing over mags at the

tables.  "We have him," he creeched.  "The poisonous young

swine who ruined the books on Crystallography, rare books,

books not to be obtained ever again, anywhere."  This had a

terrible mad shoom about it, as though this old veck was

really off his gulliver.  "A prize specimen of the cowardly brutal

young," he creeched.  "Here in our midst and at our mercy.  He

and his friends beat me and kicked me and thumped me.  They

stripped me and tore out my teeth.  They laughed at my blood

and my moans.  They kicked me off home, dazed and naked."

All this wasn't quite true, as you know, brothers.  He had

some platties on, he hadn't been completely nagoy.

I creeched back: "That was over two years ago.  I've been

punished since then.  I've learned my lesson.  See over there -

my picture's in the papers."

"Punishment, eh?" said one starry like ex-soldier type.  "You

lot should be exterminated.  Like so many noisome pests.  Pun-

ishment indeed."

"All right, all right," I said.  "Everybody's entitled to his

opinion.  Forgive me, all.  I must go now."  And I started to itty

out of this mesto of bezoomny old men.  Aspirin, that was it.

You could snuff it on a hundred aspirin.  Aspirin from the old

drugstore.  But the crystallography veck creeched:

"Don't let him go.  We'll teach him all about punishment,

the murderous young pig.  Get him."  And, believe it, brothers,

or do the other veshch, two or three starry dodderers, about

ninety years old apiece, grabbed me with their trembly old

rookers, and I was like made sick by the von of old age and

disease which came from these near-dead moodges.  The crys-

tal veck was on to me now, starting to deal me malenky weak

tolchocks on my litso, and I tried to get away and itty out,

but these starry rookers that held me were stronger than I had

thought.  Then other starry vecks came hobbling from the

gazettas to have a go at Your Humble Narrator.  They were

creeching veshches like: "Kill him, stamp on him, murder him,

kick his teeth in," and all that cal, and I could viddy what it was

clear enough.  It was old age having a go at youth, that's what

it was.  But some of them were saying: "Poor old Jack, near

killed poor old Jack he did, this is the young swine" and so on,

as though it had all happened yesterday.  Which to them I

suppose it had.  There was now like a sea of vonny runny dirty

old men trying to get at me with their like feeble rookers and

horny old claws, creeching and panting on to me, but our

crystal droog was there in front, dealing out tolchock after

tolchock.  And I daren't do a solitary single veshch, O my

brothers, it being better to be hit at like that than to want to

sick and feel that horrible pain, but of course the fact that

there was violence going on made me feel that the sickness

was peeping round the corner to viddy whether to come out

into the open and roar away.

Then an attendant veck came along, a youngish veck,and he

creeched: "What goes on here?  Stop it at once.  This is a read-

ing room."  But nobody took any notice.  So the attendant

veck said: "Right, I shall phone the police."  So I creeched, and I

never thought I would ever do that in all my jeezny:

"Yes yes yes, do that, protect me from these old madmen."  I

noticed that the attendant veck was not too anxious to join

in the dratsing and rescue me from the rage and madness of

these starry vecks' claws; he just scatted off to his like office

or wherever the telephone was.  Now these old men were pan-

ting a lot now, and I felt I could just flick at them and they

would all fall over, but I just let myself be held, very patient,

by these starry rookers, my glazzies closed, and feel the feeble

tolchocks on my litso, also slooshy the panting breathy old

golosses creeching: "Young swine, young murderer, hooligan,

thug, kill him."  Then I got such a real painful tolchock on the

nose that I said to myself to hell to hell, and I opened my

glazzies up and started to struggle to get free, which was not

hard, brothers, and I tore off creeching to the sort of hallway

outside the reading-room.  But these starry avengers still came

after me, panting like dying, with their animal claws all trem-

bling to get at your friend and Humble Narrator.  Then I was

tripped up and was on the floor and was being kicked at, then

I slooshied golosses of young vecks creeching: "All right, all

right, stop it now," and I knew the police had arrived.

3

I was like dazed, O my brothers, and could not viddy very

clear, but I was sure I had met these millicents some mesto

before.  The one who had hold of me, going: "There there

there," just by the front door of the Public Biblio, him I did

not know at all, but it seemed to me he was like very young to

be a rozz.  But the other two had backs that I was sure I had

viddied before.  They were lashing into these starry old vecks

with great bolshy glee and joy, swishing away with malenky

whips, creeching: "There, you naughty boys.  That should

teach you to stop rioting and breaking the State's Peace, you

wicked villains, you."  So they drove these panting and wheez-

ing and near dying starry avengers back into the reading-

room, then they turned round, smecking with the fun they'd

had, to viddy me.  The older one of the two said:

"Well well well well well well well.  If it isn't little Alex.  Very

long time no viddy, droog.  How goes?"  I was like dazed, the

uniform and the shlem or helmet making it hard to viddy who

this was, though litso and goloss were very familiar.  Then I

looked at the other one, and about him, with his grinning

bezoomny litso, there was no doubt.  Then, all numb and

growing number, I looked back at the well well welling one.

This one was then fatty old Billyboy, my old enemy.  The

other was, of course, Dim, who had used to be my droog and

also the enemy of stinking fatty goaty Billyboy, but was now

a millicent with uniform and shlem and whip to keep order. I

said:

"Oh no."

"Surprise, eh?"  And old Dim came out with the old guff I

remembered so horrorshow: "Huh huh huh."

"It's impossible," I said.  "It can't be so.  I don't believe

it."

"Evidence of the old glazzies," grinned Billyboy.  "Nothing up

our sleeves.  No magic, droog.  A job for two who are now of

job-age.  The police."

"You're too young," I said.  "Much too young.  They don't

make rozzes of malchicks of your age."

"Was young," went old millicent Dim.  I could not get over

it, brothers, I really could not.  "That's what we was, young

droogie.  And you it was that was always the youngest.  And

here now we are."

"I still can't believe it," I said.  Then Billyboy, rozz Billyboy

that I couldn't get over, said to this young millicent that was

like holding on to me and that I did not know:

"More good would be done, I think, Rex, if we doled out a

bit of the old summary.  Boys will be boys, as always was.  No

need to go through the old station routine.  This one here has

been up to his old tricks, as we can well remember though

you, of course, can't.  He has been attacking the aged and

defenceless, and they have properly been retaliating.  But we

must have our say in the State's name."

"What is all this?" I said, not able hardly to believe my

ookos.  "It was them that went for me, brothers.  You're not on

their side and can't be.  You can't be, Dim.  It was a veck we

fillied with once in the old days trying to get his own malenky

bit of revenge after all this long time."

"Long time is right," said Dim.  "I don't remember them days

too horrorshow.  Don't call me Dim no more, either.  Officer

call me."

"Enough is remembered, though," Billyboy kept nodding.

He was not so fatty as he had been.  "Naughty little malchicks

handy with cut-throat britvas - these must be kept under."

And they took me in a real strong grip and like walked me out

of the Biblio.  There was a millicent patrol-car waiting outside,

and this veck they called Rex was the driver.  They like tol-

chocked me into the back of this auto, and I couldn't help

feeling it was all really like a joke, and that Dim anyway would

pull his shlem off his gulliver and go haw haw haw.  But he

didn't.  I said, trying to fight the strack inside me:

"And old Pete, what happened to old Pete?  It was sad about

Georgie," I said.  "I slooshied all about that."

"Pete, oh yes, Pete," said Dim.  "I seem to remember like the

name."  I could viddy we were driving out of town.  I said:

"Where are we supposed to be going?"

Billyboy turned round from the front to say: "It's light still.

A little drive into the country, all winter-bare but lonely and

lovely.  It is not right, not always, for lewdies in the town to

viddy too much of our summary punishments.  Streets must be

kept clean in more than one way."  And he turned to the front

again.

"Come," I said.  "I just don't get this at all.  The old days are

dead and gone days.  For what I did in the past I have been

punished.  I have been cured."

"That was read out to us," said Dim.  "The Super read all that

out to us.  He said it was a very good way."

"Read to you," I said, a malenky bit nasty.  "You still too dim

to read for yourself, O brother?"

"Ah, no," said Dim, very like gentle and like regretful.  "Not

to speak like that.  Not no more, droogie."  And he launched a

bolshy tolchock right on my cluve, so that all red red nose-

krovvy started to drip drip drip.

"There was never any trust," I said, bitter, wiping off the

krovvy with my rooker.  "I was always on my oddy knocky."

"This will do," said Billyboy.  We were now in the country

and it was all bare trees and a few odd distant like twitters,

and in the distance there was some like farm machine making

a whirring shoom.  It was getting all dusk now, this being the

height of winter.  There were no lewdies about, nor no

animals.  There was just the four.  "Get out, Alex boy," said

Dim.  "Just a malenky bit of summary."

All through what they did this driver veck just sat at the

wheel of the auto, smoking a cancer, reading a malenky bit of

a book.  He had the light on in the auto to viddy by.  He took

no notice of what Billyboy and Dim did to your Humble

Narrator.  I will not go into what they did, but it was all like

panting and thudding against this like background of whirring

farm engines and the twittwittwittering in the bare or nagoy

branches.  You could viddy a bit of smoky breath in the auto

light, this driver turning the pages over quite calm.  And they

were on to me all the time, O my brothers.  Then Billyboy or

Dim, I couldn't say which one, said: "About enough, droogie.  I

should think, shouldn't you?"  Then they gave me one final

tolchock on the litso each and I fell over and just laid there

on the grass.  It was cold but I was not feeling the cold.  Then

they dusted their rookers and put back on their shlems and

tunics which they had taken off, and then they got back into

the auto.  "Be viddying you some more sometime, Alex," said

Billyboy, and Dim just gave one of his old clowny guffs.  The

driver finished the page he was reading and put his book away,

then he started the auto and they were off townwards, my ex-

droog and ex-enemy waving.  But I just laid there, fagged and

shagged.

After a bit I was hurting bad, and then the rain started, all

icy.  I could viddy no lewdies in sight, nor no lights of houses.

Where was I to go, who had no home and not much cutter in

my carmans?  I cried for myself boo hoo hoo.  Then I got up

and started walking.

4

Home, home, home, it was home I was wanting, and it was

HOME I came to, brothers.  I walked through the dark and

followed not the town way but the way where the shoom of a

like farm machine had been coming from.  This brought me to

a sort of village I felt I had viddied before, but was perhaps

because all villages look the same, in the dark especially.  Here

were houses and there was a like drinking mesto, and right at

the end of the village there was a malenky cottage on its oddy

knocky, and I could viddy its name shining on the gate.

HOME, it said.  I was all dripping wet with this icy rain, so

that my platties were no longer in the heighth of fashion but

real miserable and like pathetic, and my luscious glory was a

wet tangle cally mess all spread over my gulliver, and I was

sure there were cuts and bruises all over my litso, and a couple

of my zoobies sort of joggled loose when I touched them

with my tongue or yahzick.  And I was sore all over my plott

and very thirsty, so that I kept opening my rot to the cold

rain, and my stomach growled grrrrr all the time with not

having had any pishcha since morning and then not very

much, O my brothers.

HOME, it said, and perhaps here would be some veck to

help.  I opened the gate and sort of slithered down the path,

the rain like turning to ice, and then I knocked gentle and

pathetic on the door.  No veck came, so I knocked a malenky

bit longer and louder, and then I heard the shoom of nogas

coming to the door.  Then the door opened and a male goloss

said: "Yes, what is it?"

"Oh," I said, "please help.  I've been beaten up by the police

and just left to die on the road.  Oh, please give me a drink of

something and a sit by the fire, please, sir."

The door opened full then, and I could viddy like warm

light and a fire going crackle crackle within.  "Come in," said

this veck, "whoever you are.  God help you, you poor victim,

come in and let's have a look at you."  So I like staggered in,

and it was no big act I was putting on, brothers, I really felt

done and finished.  This kind veck put his rookers round my

pletchoes and pulled me into this room where the fire was,

and of course I knew right away now where it was and why

HOME on the gate looked so familiar.  I looked at this veck

and he looked at me in a kind sort of way, and I remembered

him well now.  Of course he would not remember me, for in

those carefree days I and my so-called droogs did all our

bolshy dratsing and fillying and crasting in maskies which were

real horrorshow disguises.  He was a shortish veck in middle

age, thirty, forty, fifty, and he had otchkies on.  "Sit down by

the fire," he said, "and I'll get you some whisky and warm

water.  Dear dear dear, somebody has been beating you up."

And he gave a like tender look at my gulliver and litso.

"The police," I said.  "The horrible ghastly police."

"Another victim," he said, like sighing.  "A victim of the

modern age.  I'll go and get you that whisky and then I must

clean up your wounds a little."  And off he went.  I had a look

round this malenky comfortable room.  It was nearly all

books now and a fire and a couple of chairs, and you could

viddy somehow that there wasn't a woman living there.  On

the table was a typewriter and a lot of like tumbled papers,

and I remembered that this veck was a writer veck.  'A Clock-

work Orange', that had been it.  It was funny that that stuck in

my mind.  I must not let on, though, for I needed help and

kindness now.  Those horrible grahzny bratchnies in that ter-

rible white mesto had done that to me, making me need help

and kindness now and forcing me to want to give help and

kindness myself, if anybody would take it.

"Here we are, then," said this veck returning.  He gave me this

hot stimulating glassful to peet, and it made me feel better,

and then he cleaned up these cuts on my litso.  Then he said:

"You have a nice hot bath, I'll draw it for you, and then you

can tell me all about it over a nice hot supper which I'll get

ready while you're having the bath."  O my brothers, I could

have wept at his kindness, and I think he must have viddied the

old tears in my glazzies, for he said: "There there there," pat-

ting me on the pletcho.

Anyway, I went up and had this hot bath, and he brought in

pyjamas and an over-gown for me to put on, all warmed by

the fire, also a very worn pair of toofles.  And now, brothers,

though I was aching and full of pains all over, I felt I would

soon feel a lot better.  I ittied downstairs and viddied that in

the kitchen he had set the table with knives and forks and a

fine big loaf of kleb, also a bottle of PRIMA SAUCE, and

soon he served out a nice fry of eggiwegs and lomticks of

ham and bursting sausages and big bolshy mugs of hot sweet

milky chai.  It was nice sitting there in the warm, eating, and I

found I was very hungry, so that after the fry I had to eat

lomtick after lomtick of kleb and butter spread with straw-

berry jam out of a bolshy great pot.  "A lot better," I said.  "How

can I ever repay?"

"I think I know who you are," he said.  "If you are who I

think you are, then you've come, my friend, to the right place.

Wasn't that your picture in the papers this morning?  Are you

the poor victim of this horrible new technique?  If so, then

you have been sent here by Providence.  Tortured in prison,

then thrown out to be tortured by the police.  My heart goes

out to you, poor poor boy."  Brothers, I could not get a slovo

in, though I had my rot wide open to answer his questions.

"You are not the first to come here in distress," he said.  "The

police are fond of bringing their victims to the outskirts of

this village.  But it is providential that you, who are also

another kind of victim, should come here.  Perhaps, then, you

have heard of me?"

I had to be very careful, brothers.  I said: "I have heard of 'A

Clockwork Orange'.  I have not read it, but I have heard of

it."

"Ah," he said, and his litso shone like the sun in its flaming

morning glory.  "Now tell me about yourself."

"Little enough to tell, sir," I said, all humble.  "There was a

foolish and boyish prank, my so-called friends persuading or

rather forcing me to break into the house of an old ptitsa -

lady, I mean.  There was no real harm meant.  Unfortunately

the lady strained her good old heart in trying to throw me

out, though I was quite ready to go of my own accord, and

then she died.  I was accused of being the cause of her death.

So I was sent to prison,sir."

"Yes yes yes, go on."

"Then I was picked out by the Minister of the Inferior or

Interior to have this Ludovico's veshch tried out on me."

"Tell me all about it," he said, leaning forward eager, his

pullover elbows with all strawberry jam on them from the

plate I'd pushed to one side.  So I told him all about it.  I told

him the lot, all, my brothers.  He was very eager to hear all, his

glazzies like shining and his goobers apart, while the grease

on the plates grew harder harder harder.  When I had finished

he got up from the table, nodding a lot and going hm hm hm,

picking up the plates and other veshches from the table and

taking them to the sink for washing up.  I said:

"I will do that, sir, and gladly."

"Rest, rest, poor lad," he said, turning the tap on so that all

steam came burping out.  "You've sinned, I suppose, but your

punishment has been out of all proportion.  They have turned

you into something other than a human being.  You have no

power of choice any longer.  You are committed to socially

acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good.  And I

see that clearly - that business about the marginal condition-

ings.  Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a

source now not of pleasure but of pain."

"That's right, sir," I said, smoking one of this kind man's

cork-tipped cancers.

"They always bite off too much," he said, drying a plate like

absent-mindedly.  "But the essential intention is the real sin.  A

man who cannot choose ceases to be a man."

"That's what the charles said, sir," I said.  "The prison chap-

lain, I mean."

"Did he, did he?  Of course he did.  He'd have to, wouldn't

he, being a Christian?  Well, now then," he said, still wiping the

same plate he'd been wiping ten minutes ago, "we shall have a

few people in to see you tomorrow.  I think you can be used,

poor boy.  I think that you can help dislodge this overbearing

Government.  To turn a decent young man into a piece of

clockwork should not, surely, be seen as any triumph for any

government, save one that boasts of its repressiveness."  He

was still wiping this same plate.  I said:

"Sir, you're still wiping that same plate, I agree with you, sir,

about boasting.  This Government seems to be very boast-

ful."

"Oh," he said, like viddying this plate for the first time and

then putting it down.  "I'm still not too handy," he said, "with

domestic chores.  My wife used to do them all and leave me to

my writing."

"Your wife, sir?" I said.  "Has she gone and left you?"  I really

wanted to know about his wife, remembering very well.

"Yes, left me," he said, in a like loud and bitter goloss.  "She

died, you see.  She was brutally raped and beaten.  The shock

was very great.  It was in this house," his rookers were trem-

bling, holding a wiping-up cloth, "in that room next door.  I

have had to steel myself to continue to live here, but she

would have wished me to stay where her fragrant memory

still lingers.  Yes yes yes.  Poor little girl."  I viddied all clearly,

my brothers, what had happened that far-off nochy, and vid-

dying myself on that job, I began to feel I wanted to sick and

the pain started up in my gulliver.  This veck viddied this, be-

cause my litso felt it was all drained of red red krovvy, very

pale, and he would be able to viddy this.  "You go to bed now,"

he said kindly.  "I've got the spare room ready.  Poor poor boy,

you must have had a terrible time.  A victim of the modern

age, just as she was.  Poor poor poor girl."

5

I had a real horrorshow night's sleep, brothers, with no

dreams at all, and the morning was very clear and like frosty,

and there was the very pleasant like von of breakfast frying

away down below.  It took me some little time to remember

where I was, as it always does, but it soon came back to me

and then I felt like warmed and protected.  But, as I laid there

in the bed, waiting to be called down to breakfast, it struck

me that I ought to get to know the name of this kind pro-

tecting and like motherly veck, so I had a pad round in my

nagoy nogas looking for 'A Clockwork Orange', which would

be bound to have his eemya in, he being the author.  There was

nothing in my bedroom except a bed and a chair and a light,

so I ittied next door to this veck's own room, and there I

viddied his wife on the wall, a bolshy blown-up photo, so I

felt a malenky bit sick remembering.  But there were two or

three shelves of books there too, and there was, as I thought

there must be, a copy of 'A Clockwork Orange', and on the

back of the book, like on the spine, was the author's eemya -

F. Alexander.  Good Bog, I thought, he is another Alex.  Then I

leafed through, standing in his pyjamas and bare nogas but

not feeling one malenky bit cold, the cottage being warm all

through, and I could not viddy what the book was about.  It

seemed written in a very bezoomny like style, full of Ah and

Oh and all that cal, but what seemed to come out of it was that

all lewdies nowadays were being turned into machines and

that they were really - you and me and him and kiss-my-

sharries - more like a natural growth like a fruit.  F. Alexander

seemed to think that we all like grow on what he called the

world-tree in the world-orchard that like Bog or God

planted, and we were there because Bog or God had need of

us to quench his thirsty love, or some such cal.  I didn't like

the shoom of this at all, O my brothers, and wondered how

bezoomny this F. Alexander really was, perhaps driven be-

zoomny by his wife's snuffing it.  But then he called me down

in a like sane veck's goloss, full of joy and love and all that

cal, so down Your Humble Narrator went.

'You've slept long," he said, ladling out boiled eggs and

pulling black toast from under the grill.  "It's nearly ten

already.  I've been up hours, working."

"Writing another book, sir?" I said.

"No no, not that now," he said, and we sat down nice and

droogy to the old crack crack crack of eggs and crackle

crunch crunch of this black toast, very milky chai standing by

in bolshy great morning mugs.  "No, I've been on the phone to

various people."

"I thought you didn't have a phone," I said, spooning egg in

and not watching out what I was saying.

"Why?" he said, very alert like some skorry animal with an

egg-spoon in its rooker.  "Why shouldn't you think I have a

phone?"

"Nothing," I said, "nothing, nothing."  And I wondered,

brothers, how much he remembered of the earlier part of that

distant nochy, me coming to the door with the old tale and

saying to phone the doctor and she saying no phone.  He

took a very close smot at me but then went back to being like

kind and cheerful and spooning up the old eggiweg.  Munching

away, he said:

"Yes, I've rung up various people who will be interested in

your case.  You can be a very potent weapon, you see, in en-

suring that this present evil and wicked Government is not

returned in the forthcoming election.  The Government's big

boast, you see, is the way it has dealt with crime these last

months."  He looked at me very close again over his steaming

egg, and I wondered again if he was viddying what part I had so

far played in his jeezny.  But he said: "Recruiting brutal young

roughs for the police.  Proposing debilitating and will-sapping

techniques of conditioning."  All these long slovos, brothers,

and a like mad or bezoomny look in his glazzies.  "We've seen

it all before," he said, "in other countries.  The thin end of the

wedge.  Before we know where we are we shall have the full

apparatus of totalitarianism."  "Dear dear dear," I thought,

egging away and toast-crunching.  I said:

"Where do I come into all this, sir?"

"You," he said, still with this bezoomny look, "are a living

witness to these diabolical proposals.  The people, the

common people must know, must see."  He got up from his

breakfast and started to walk up and down the kitchen, from

the sink to the like larder, saying very gromky: "Would they

like their sons to become what you, poor victim, have

become?  Will not the Government itself now decide what is

and what is not crime and pump out the life and guts and will

of whoever sees fit to displeasure the Government?  He became

quieter but did not go back to his egg.  "I've written an article,"

he said, "this morning, while you were sleeping.  That will be

out in a day or so, together with your unhappy picture.  You

shall sign it, poor boy, a record of what they have done to

you."  I said:

"And what do you get out of all this, sir?  I mean, besides

the pretty polly you'll get for the article, as you call it?  I

mean, why are you so hot and strong against this Govern-

ment, if I may make like so bold as to ask?"

He gripped the edge of the table and said, gritting his

zoobies, which were very cally and all stained with cancer-

smoke: "Some of us have to fight.  There are great traditions

of liberty to defend.  I am no partisan man.  Where I see the

infamy I seek to erase it.  Party names mean nothing.  The tra-

dition of liberty means all.  The common people will let it go,

oh yes.  They will sell liberty for a quieter life.  That is why they

must be prodded, prodded - "  And here, brothers, he picked

up a fork and stuck it two or three razzes into the wall, so

that it got all bent.  Then he threw it on the floor.  Very kindly

he said: "Eat well, poor boy, poor victim of the modern

world," and I could viddy quite clear he was going off his

gulliver.  "Eat, eat.  Eat my egg as well."  But I said:

"And what do I get out of this?  Do I get cured of the way I

am?  Do I find myself able to slooshy the old Choral Sym-

phony without being sick once more?  Can I live like a normal

jeezny again?  What, sir, happens to me?"

He looked at me, brothers, as if he hadn't thought of that

before and, anyway, it didn't matter compared with Liberty

and all that cal, and he had a look of surprise at me saying

what I said, as though I was being like selfish in wanting some-

thing for myself.  Then he said: "Oh, as I say, you're a living

witness, poor boy.  Eat up all your breakfast and then come

and see what I've written, for it's going into 'The Weekly

Trumpet' under your name, you unfortunate victim."

Well, brothers, what he had written was a very long and

very weepy piece of writing, and as I read it I felt very sorry

for the poor malchick who was govoreeting about his

sufferings and how the Government had sapped his will and

how it was up to all lewdies to not let such a rotten and evil

Government rule them again, and then of course I realized

that the poor suffering malchick was none other than Y. H. N.

"Very good," I said.  "Real horrorshow.  Written well thou

hast, O sir."  And then he looked at me very narrow and

said:

"What?"  It was like he had not slooshied me before.

"Oh, that," I said, "is what we call nadsat talk.  All the teens

use that, sir."  So then he ittied off to the kitchen to wash up

the dishes, and I was left in these borrowed night platties and

toofles, waiting to have done to me what was going to be

done to me, because I had no plans for myself, O my

brothers.

While the great F. Alexander was in the kitchen a ding-

alingaling came at the door.  "Ah," he creeched, coming out

wiping his rookers, "it will be these people.  I'll go."  So he went

and let them in, a kind of rumbling hahaha of talk and hallo

and filthy weather and how are things in the hallway, then

they ittied into the room with the fire and the book and the

article about how I had suffered, viddying me and going

Aaaaah as they did it.  There were three lewdies, and F. Alex

gave me their eemyas.  Z.Dolin was a very wheezy smoky kind

of a veck, coughing kashl kashl kashl with the end of a cancer

in his rot, spilling ash all down his platties and then brushing

it away with like very impatient rookers.  He was a malenky

round veck, fat, with big thick-framed otchkies on.  Then there

was Something Something Rubinstein, a very tall and polite

chelloveck with a real gentleman's goloss, very starry with a

like eggy beard.  And lastly there was D. B. da Silva who was

like skorry in his movements and had this strong von of scent

coming from him.  They all had a real horrorshow look at me

and seemed like overjoyed with what they viddied.  Z. Dolin

said:

"All right, all right, eh?  What a superb device he can be, this

boy.  If anything, of course, he could for preference look even

iller and more zombyish than he does.  Anything for the cause.

No doubt we can think of something."

I did not like that crack about zombyish, brothers, and so I

said: "What goes on, bratties?  What dost thou in mind for thy

little droog have?"  And the F. Alexander swooshed in

with:

"Strange, strange, that manner of voice pricks me.  We've

come into contact before, I'm sure we have."  And he brooded,

like frowning.  I would have to watch this, O my brothers.

D. B. da Silva said:

"Public meetings, mainly.  To exhibit you at public meetings

will be a tremendous help.  And, of course, the newspaper

angle is all tied up.  A ruined life is the approach.  We must

inflame all hearts."  He showed his thirty-odd zoobies, very

white against his dark-coloured litso, he looking a malenky

bit like some foreigner.  I said:

"Nobody will tell me what I get out of all this.  Tortured in

jail, thrown out of my home by my own parents and their

filthy overbearing lodger, beaten by old men and near-killed

by the millicents - what is to become of me?"  The Rubinstein

veck came in with:

"You will see, boy, that the Party will not be ungrateful.  Oh,

no.  At the end of it all there will be some very acceptable little

surprise for you.  Just you wait and see."

"There's only one veshch I require," I creeched out, "and

that's to be normal and healthy as I was in the starry days,

having my malenky bit of fun with real droogs and not those

who just call themselves that and are really more like traitors.

Can you do that, eh?  Can any veck restore me to what I was?

That's what I want and that's what I want to know."

Kashl kashl kashl, coughed this Z. Dolin.  "A martyr to the

cause of Liberty." he said.  "You have your part to play and

don't forget it.  Meanwhile, we shall look after you."  And he

began to stroke my left rooker as if I was like an idiot, grin-

ning in a bezoomny way.  I creeched:

"Stop treating me like a thing that's like got to be just used.

I'm not an idiot you can impose on, you stupid bratchnies.

Ordinary prestoopnicks are stupid, but I'm not ordinary and

nor am I dim.  Do you slooshy?"

"Dim," said F. Alexander, like musing.  "Dim.  That was a name

somewhere.  Dim."

"Eh?" I said.  "What's Dim got to do with it?  What do you

know about Dim?"  And then I said: "Oh, Bog help us."  I didn't

like the look in F. Alexander's glazzies.  I made for the

door, wanting to go upstairs and get my platties and then itty

off.

"I could almost believe," said F. Alexander, showing his

stained zoobies, his glazzies mad.  "But such things are impos-

sible.  For, by Christ, if he were I'd tear him.  I'd split him, by

God, yes yes, so I would."

"There," said D. B. da Silva, stroking his chest like he was a

doggie to calm him down.  "It's all in the past.  It was other

people altogether.  We must help this poor victim.  That's what

we must do now, remembering the Future and our Cause."

"I'll just get my platties," I said, at the stair-foot, "that is to

say clothes, and then I'll be ittying off all on my oddy knocky.

I mean, my gratitude for all, but I have my own jeezny to live."

Because, brothers, I wanted to get out of here real skorry.  But

Z. Dolin said:

"Ah, no.  We have you, friend, and we keep you.  You come

with us.  Everything will be all right, you'll see."  And he came

up to me like to grab hold of my rooker again.  Then,

brothers, I thought of fight, but thinking of fight made me like

want to collapse and sick, so I just stood.  And then I saw this

like madness in F. Alexander's glazzies and said:

"Whatever you say.  I am in your rookers.  But let's get it

started and all over, brothers."  Because what I wanted now

was to get out of this mesto called HOME.  I was beginning

not to like the look of the glazzies of F. Alexander one

malenky bit.

"Good," said this Rubinstein.  "Get dressed and let's get

started."

"Dim dim dim," F. Alexander kept saying in a like low

mutter.  "What or who was this Dim?"  I ittied upstairs real

skorry and dressed in near two seconds flat.  Then I was out

with these three and into an auto, Rubinstein one side of me

and Z. Dolin coughing kashl kashl kashl the other side.  D. B.

da Silva doing the driving, into the town and to a flatblock

not really all that distant from what had used to be my own

flatblock or home.  "Come, boy, out," said Z. Dolin, coughing

to make the cancer-end in his rot glow red like some malenky

furnace.  "This is where you shall be installed."  So we ittied in,

and there was like another of these Dignity of Labour vesh-

ches on the wall of the vestibule, and we upped in the lift,

brothers, and then went into a flat like all the flats of all the

flatblocks of the town.  Very very malenky, with two bed-

rooms and one live-eat-work-room, the table of this all

covered with books and papers and ink and bottles and all

that cal.  "Here is your new home," said D. B. da Silva.  "Settle

here, boy.  Food is in the food-cupboard.  Pyjamas are in a

drawer.  Rest, rest, perturbed spirit."

"Eh?" I said, not quite ponying that.

"All right," said Rubinstein, with his starry goloss.  "We are

now leaving you.  Work has to be done.  We'll be with you

later.  Occupy yourself as best you can."

"One thing," coughed Z. Dolin kashl kashl kashl.  "You saw

what stirred in the tortured memory of our friend F. Alexan-

der.  Was it, by chance - ?  That is to say, did you - ?  I think

you know what I mean.  We won't let it go any further."

"I've paid," I said.  "Bog knows I've paid for what I did.  I've

paid not only for like myself but for those bratchnies too

that called themselves my droogs."  I felt violent so then I felt a

bit sick.  "I'll lay down a bit," I said.  "I've been through terrible

terrible times."

"You have," said D. B. da Silva, showing all his thirty

zoobies.  "You do that."

So they left me, brothers.  They ittied off about their

business, which I took to be about politics and all that cal,

and I was on the bed, all on my oddy knocky with everything

very very quiet.  I just laid there with my sabogs kicked off my

nogas and my tie loose, like all bewildered and not knowing

what sort of a jeezny I was going to live now.  And all sorts of

like pictures kept like passing through my gulliver, of the

different chellovecks I'd met at school and in the Staja, and

the different veshches that had happened to me, and how

there was not one veck you could trust in the whole bolshy

world.  And then I like dozed off, brothers.

When I woke up I could hear slooshy music coming out of

the wall, real gromky, and it was that that had dragged me out

of my bit of like sleep.  It was a symphony that I knew real

horrorshow but had not slooshied for many a year, namely

the Symphony Number Three of the Danish veck Otto Skade-

lig, a very gromky and violent piece, especially in the first

movement, which was what was playing now.  I slooshied for

two seconds in like interest and joy, but then it all came over

me, the start of the pain and the sickness, and I began to

groan deep down in my keeshkas.  And then there I was, me

who had loved music so much, crawling off the bed and going

oh oh oh to myself and then bang bang banging on the wall

creching: "Stop, stop it, turn it off!"  But it went on and it

seemed to be like louder.  So I crashed at the wall till my

knuckles were all red red krovvy and torn skin, creeching and

creeching, but the music did not stop.  Then I thought I had to

get away from it, so I lurched out of the malenky bedroom

and ittied skorry to the front door of the flat, but this had

been locked from the outside and I could not get out.  And all

the time the music got more and more gromky, like it was all

a deliberate torture, O my brothers.  So I stuck my little fingers

real deep in my ookos, but the trombones and kettledrums

blasted through gromky enough.  So I creeched again for them

to stop and went hammer hammer hammer on the wall, but it

made not one malenky bit of difference.  "Oh, what am I to

do?" I boohooed to myself.  "Oh, Bog in Heaven help me."  I

was like wandering all over the flat in pain and sickness, trying

to shut out the music and like groaning deep out of my guts,

and then on top of the pile of books and papers and all that

cal that was on the tablein the living room I viddied what I

had to do and what I had wanted to do until those old men in

the Public Biblio and then Dim and Billyboy disguised as

rozzes stopped me, and that was to do myself in, to snuff it,

to blast off for ever out of this wicked and cruel world.  What

I viddied was the slovo DEATH on the cover of a like pam-

phlet, even though it was only DEATH to THE GOVERN-

MENT.  And like it was Fate there was another malenky

booklet which had an open window on the cover, and it said:

"Open the window to fresh air, fresh ideas, a new way of

living."  And so I knew that was like telling me to finish it all off

by jumping out.  One moment of pain, perhaps, and then sleep

for ever and ever and ever.

The music was still pouring in all brass and drums and the

violins miles up through the wall.  The window in the room

where I had laid down was open.  I ittied to it and viddied a

fair drop to the autos and buses and waiting chellovecks

below.  I creeched out to the world: "Good-bye, good-bye,

may Bog forgive you for a ruined life."  Then I got on to the

sill, the music blasting away to my left, and I shut my glazzies

and felt the cold wind on my litso, then I jumped.

6

I jumped, O my brothers, and I fell on the sidewalk hard, but I

did not snuff it, oh no.  If I had snuffed it I would not be here

to write what I written have.  It seems that the jump was not

from a big enough heighth to kill.  But I cracked my back and

my wrists and nogas and felt very bolshy pain before I passed

out, brothers, with astonished and surprised litsos of chello-

vecks in the streets looking at me from above.  And just before

I passed out I viddied clear that not one chelloveck in the

whole horrid world was for me and that that music through

the wall had all been like arranged by those who were sup-

posed to be my like new droogs and that it was some veshch

like this that they wanted for their horrible selfish and boast-

ful politics.  All that was in like a million millionth part of one

minoota before I threw over the world and the sky and the

litsos of the staring chellovecks that were above me.

Where I was when I came back to jeezny after a long black

black gap of it might have been a million years was a hospital,

all white and with this von of hospitals you get, all like sour

and smug and clean.  These antiseptic veshches you get in hos-

pitals should have a real horrorshow von of like frying

onions or of flowers.  I came very slow back to knowing who

I was and I was all bound up in white and I could not feel

anything in my plott, pain nor sensation nor any veshch at all.

All round my gulliver was a bandage and there were bits of

stuff like stuck to my litso, and my rookers were all in

bandages and like bits of stick were like fixed to my fingers like

on it might be flowers to make them grow straight, and my

poor old nogas were all straightened out too, and it was all

bandages and wire cages and into my right rooker, near the

pletcho, was red red krovvy dripping from a jar upside down.

But I could not feel anything, O my brothers.  There was a

nurse sitting by my bed and she was reading some book that

was all very dim print and you could viddy it was a story

because of a lot of inverted commas, and she was like breath-

ing hard uh uh uh over it, so it must have been a story about

the old in-out in-out.  She was a real horrorshow devotchka,

this nurse, with a very red rot and like long lashes over her

glazzies, and under her like very stiff uniform you could viddy

she had very horrorshow groodies.  So I said to her: "What

gives, O my little sister?  Come thou and have a nice lay-down

with your malenky droog in this bed."  But the slovos didn't

come out horrorshow at all, it being as though my rot was all

stiffened up, and I could feel with my yahzick that some of my

zoobies were no longer there.  But this nurse like jumped and

dropped her book on the floor and said:

"Oh, you've recovered consciousness."

That was like a big rotful for a malenky ptitsa like her, and

I tried to say so, but the slovos came out only like er er er.

She ittied off and left me on my oddy knocky, and I could

viddy now that I was in a malenky room of my own, not in

one of these long wards like I had been in as a very little

malchick, full of coughing dying starry vecks all around to

make you want to get well and fit again.  It had been like

diphtheria I had had then, O my brothers.

It was like now as though I could not hold to being con-

scious all that long, because I was like asleep again almost

right away, very skorry, but in a minoota or two I was sure

that this nurse ptitsa had come back and had brought chello-

vecks in white coats with her and they were viddying me very

frowning and going hm hm hm at Your Humble Narrator.  And

with them I was sure there was the old charles from the Staja

govoreeting: "Oh my son, my son," breathing a like very stale

von of whisky on to me and then saying: "But I would not

stay, oh no.  I could not in no wise subscribe to what those

bratchnies are going to do to other poor prestoopnicks.  O I

got out and am preaching sermons now about it all, my little

beloved son in J. C."

I woke up again later on and who should I viddy there

round the bed but the three from whose flat I had jumped out,

namely D. B. da Silva and Something Something Rubinstein

and Z. Dolin.  "Friend," one of these vecks was saying, but I

could not viddy, or slooshy horrorshow which one, "friend,

little friend," this goloss was saying, "the people are on fire

with indignation.  You have killed those horrible boastful

villains' chances of re-election.  They will go and will go

for ever and ever.  You have served Liberty well."  I tried to

say:

"If I had died it would have been even better for you politi-

cal bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous

droogs as you are."  But all that came out was er er er.  Then

one of these three seemed to hold out a lot of bits cut from

gazettas and what I could viddy was a horrible picture of me

all krovvy on a stretcher being carried off and I seemed to like

remember a kind of a popping of lights which must have been

photographer vecks.  Out of one glazz I could read like head-

lines which were sort of trembling in the rooker of the

chelloveck that held them, like BOY VICTIM OF CRIMINAL

REFORM SCHEME and GOVERNMENT AS MUR-

DERER and there was like a picture of a veck that

looked familiar to me and it said OUT OUT OUT, and that

would be the Minister of the Inferior or Interior.  Then the

nurse ptitsa said:

"You shouldn't be exciting him like that.  You shouldn't be

doing anything that will make him upset.  Now come on, let's

have you out."  I tried to say:

"Out out out," but it was er er er again.  Anyway, these three

political vecks went.  And I went, too, only back to the land,

back to all blackness lit up by like odd dreams which I didn't

know whether they were dreams or not, O my brothers.  Like

for instance I had this idea of my whole plott or body being

like emptied of as it might be dirty water and then filled up

again with clean.  And then there were really lovely and horror-

show dreams of being in some veck's auto that had been crasted

by me and driving up and down the world all on my oddy

knocky running lewdies down and hearing them creech they

were dying, and in me no pain and no sickness.  And also there

were dreams of doing the old in-out in-out with devotchkas,

forcing like them down on the ground and making them have

it and everybody standing around claping their rookers and

cheering like bezoomny.  And then I woke up again and it was

my pee and em come to viddy their ill son, my em boohooing

real horrorshow.  I could govoreet a lot better now and could say:

"Well well well well well, what gives?  What makes you think

you are like welcome?"  My papapa said, in a like ashamed

way:

"You were in the papers, son.  It said they had done great

wrong to you.  It said how the Government drove you to try

and do yourself in.  And it was our fault too, in a way, son.

Your home's your home, when all's said and done, son."  And

my mum kept on going boohoohoo and looking ugly as kiss-

my-sharries.  So I said:

"And how beeth the new son Joe?  Well and healthy and

prosperous, I trust and pray?"  My mum said:

"Oh, Alex Alex.  Owwwwwwww."  My papapa said:

"A very awkward thing, son.  He got into a bit of trouble

with the police and was done by the police."

"Really?" I said.  "Really?  Such a good sort of chelloveck and

all.  Amazed proper I am, honest."

"Minding his own business he was," said my pee.  "And the

police told him to move on.  Waiting at a corner he was, son,

to see a girl he was going to meet.  And they told him to move

on and he said he had rights like everybody else, and then they

sort of fell on top of him and hit him about cruel."

"Terrible," I said.  "Really terrible.  And where is the poor boy

now?"

"Owwwww," boohooed my mum. "Gone back owww-

wwwme."

"Yes," said dad.  "He's gone back to his own home town to

get better.  They've had to give his job here to somebody

else."

"So now," I said, "You're willing for me to move back in

again and things be like they were before."

"Yes, son," said my papapa.  "Please, son."

"I'll consider it," I said.  "I'll think about it real careful."

"Owwwww," went my mum.

"Ah, shut it," I said, "or I'll give you something proper to

yowl and creech about.  Kick your zoobies in I will."  And, O

my brothers, saying that made me feel a malenky bit better, as

if all like fresh red red krovvy was flowing all through my

plott.  That was something I had to think about.  It was like as

though to get better I had had to get worse.

"That's no way to speak to your mother, son," said my

papapa.  "After all, she brought you into the world."

"Yes," I said.  "And a right grahzny vonny world too."  I shut

my glazzies tight in like pain and said: "Go away now.  I'll think

about coming back.  But things will have to be very

different."

"Yes, son," said my pee.  "Anything you say."

"You'll have to make up your mind," I said, "who's to be

boss."

"Owwwwww," my mum went on.

"Very good, son," said my papapa.  "Things will be as you

like.  Only get well."

When they had gone I laid and thought a bit about different

veshches, like all different pictures passing through my gulliver,

and when the nurse ptitsa came back in and like straightened

the sheets on the bed I said to her:

"How long is it I've been in here?"

"A week or so," she said.

"And what have they been doing to me?"

"Well," she said, "you were all broken up and bruised and

had sustained severe concussion and had lost a lot of blood.

They've had to put all that right, haven't they?"

"But," I said, "has anyone been doing anything with my gulli-

ver?  What I mean is, have they been playing around with

inside like my brain?"

"Whatever they've done," she said, "it'll all be for the

best."

But a couple of days later a couple of like doctor vecks

came in, both youngish vecks with these very sladky smiles,

and they had like a picture book with them.  One of them said:

"We want you to have a look at these and to tell us what you

think about them.  All right?"

"What giveth, O little droogies?" I said.  "What new be-

zoomny idea dost thou in mind have?"  So they both had a

like embarrassed smeck at that and then they sat down either

side of the bed and opened up this book.  On the first page

there was like a photograph of a bird-nest full of eggs.

"Yes?" one of these doctor vecks said.

"A bird-nest," I said, "full of like eggs.  Very very nice."

"And what would you like to do about it?" the other one

said.

"Oh," I said, "smash them.  Pick up the lot and like throw

them against a wall or a cliff or something and then viddy

them all smash up real horrorshow."

"Good good," they both said, and then the page was turned.

It was like a picture of one of these bolshy great birds called

peacocks with all its tail spread out in all colours in a very

boastful way.  "Yes?" said one of these vecks.

"I would like," I said, "to pull out like all those feathers in its

tail and slooshy it creech blue murder.  For being so like

boastful."

"Good," they both said, "good good good."  And they went

on turning the pages.  There were like pictures of real hor-

rorshow devotchkas, and I said I would like to give them the

old in-out in-out with lots of ultra-violence.  There were like

pictures of chellovecks being given the boot straight in the

litso and all red red krovvy everywhere and I said I would like

to be in on that.  And there was a picture of the old nagoy

droog of the prison charlie's carrying his cross up a hill, and I

said I would like to have the old hammer and nails.  Good

good good, I said:

"What is all this?"

"Deep hypnopaedia," or some such slovo, said one of these

two vecks.  "You seem to be cured."

"Cured?" I said.  "Me tied down to this bed like this and you

say cured?  Kiss my sharries is what I say."

So I waited and, O my brothers, I got a lot better, munching

away at eggiwegs and lomticks of toast and peeting bolshy

great mugs of milky chai, and then one day they said I was

going to have a very very very special visitor.

"Who?" I said, while they straightened the bed and combed

my luscious glory for me, me having the bandage off now

from my gulliver and the hair growing again.

"You'll see, you'll see," they said.  And I viddied all right.  At

two-thirty of the afternoon there were like all photographers

and men from gazettas with noteboks and pencils and all

that cal.  And, brothers, they near trumpeted a bolshy fanfare

for this great and important veck who was coming to viddy

Your Humble Narrator.  And in he came, and of course it was

none other than the Minister of the Interior or Inferior,

dressed in the heighth of fashion and with this very upper-

class haw haw goloss.  Flash flash bang went the cameras

when he put out his rooker to me to shake it.  I said:

"Well well well well well.  What giveth then, old droogie?"

Nobody seemed to quite pony that, but somebody said in a

like harsh goloss:

"Be more respectful, boy, in addressing the Minister."

"Yarbles," I said, like snarling like a doggie.  "Bolshy great

yarblockos to thee and thine."

"All right, all right," said the Interior Inferior one very

skorry.  "He speaks to me as a friend, don't you, son?"

"I am everyone's friend," I said.  "Except to my enemies."

"Well," said the Int Inf Min, sitting down by my bed.  "I and

the Government of which I am a member want you to regard

us as friends.  Yes, friends.  We have put you right, yes?  You are

getting the best of treatment.  We never wished you harm, but

there are some who did and do.  And I think you know who

those are."

"Yes yes yes," he said.  "There are certain men who wanted to

use you, yes, use you for political ends.  They would have been

glad, yes, glad for you to be dead, for they thought they could

then blame it all on the Government.  I think you know who

those men are."

"There is a man," said the Intinfmin, "called F. Alexander, a

writer of subversive literature, who has been howling for your

blood.  He has been mad with desire to stick a knife in you.

But you're safe from him now.  We put him away."

"He was supposed to be like a droogie," I said.  "Like a

mother to me was what he was."

"He found out that you had done wrong to him.  At least,"

said the Min very very skorry, "he believed you had done

wrong.  He formed this idea in his mind that you had been

responsible for the death of someone near and dear to

him."

"What you mean," I said, "is that he was told."

"He had this idea," said the Min.  "He was a menace.  We put

him away for his own protection.  And also," he said, "for

yours."

"Kind," I said.  "Most kind of thou."

"When you leave here," said the Min, "you will have no

worries.  We shall see to everything.  A good job on a good

salary.  Because you are helping us."

"Am I?" I said.

"We always help our friends, don't we?"  And then he took

my rooker and some veck creeched: "Smile!" and I smiled

like bezoomny without thinking, and then flash flash crack flash

bang there were pictures being taken of me and the Intinfmin

all droogy together.  "Good boy," said this great chelloveck.

"Good good boy.  And now, see, a present."

What was brought in now, brothers, was a big shiny box,

and I viddied clear what sort of a veshch it was.  It was a

stereo.  It was put down next to the bed and opened up and

some veck plugged its lead into the wall-socket.  "What shall it

be?" asked a veck with otchkies on his nose, and he had in his

rookers lovely shiny sleeves full of music.  "Mozart?  Beet-

hoven?  Schoenberg?  Carl Orff?"

"The Ninth," I said.  "The glorious Ninth."

And the Ninth it was, O my brothers.  Everybody began to

leave nice and quiet while I laid there with my glazzies closed,

slooshying the lovely music.  The Min said: "Good good boy,"

patting me on the pletcho, then he ittied off.  Only one veck

was left, saying: "Sign here, please."  I opened my glazzies up to

sign, not knowing what I was signing and not, O my brothers,

caring either.  Then I was left alone with the glorious Ninth of

Ludwig van.

Oh it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum.  When it came to

the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and run-

ning on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the

whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva.

And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing

movement still to come.  I was cured all right.

7

‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’

There was me, Your Humble Narrator, and my three droogs, that is

Len, Rick, and Bully being called Bully because of his bolshly big neck and very gromky goloss which was just like some bolshy great bull bellowing auuuuuuuuh.  We were sitting in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.  All round were chellovecks well away on milk plus vellocet and synthemesc and drencrom and other veshches which take you far far far away from this wicked and real world into the land to viddy Bog And All His Angels And Saints in your left sabog with lights bursting and spurting all over your mozg.  What we were peeting was the old moloko with knives in it, as we used to say, to sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, but I’ve told you all that before.

We were dressed in the heighth of fashion, which in those days was these very wide trousers and a very loose black shiny leather like jerkin over an open-necked shirt with a like scarf tucked in.  At this time too it was the heighth of fashion to use the old britva on the gulliver, so that most of the gulliver was like bald and there was hair only on the sides.  But it was always the same on the old nogas-real horrorshow bolshy big boots for kicking litsos in.

‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’

I was like the oldest of we four, and they all looked up to me as their leader, but I got the idea sometimes that Bully had the thought in his gulliver that he would like to take over, this being because of his bigness and the gromky goloss that bellowed out of him when he was on the warpath.  But all the ideas came from Your Humble, O my brothers, and also there was this veshch that I had been famous and had had my pictures and articles and all that cal in the gazettas.  Also I had by far the best job of all we four, being in the National Gramodisc Archives on the music side with a real horrorshow carman full of pretty polly at the week’s end and a lot of nice free discs for my own malenky self on the side.

This evening in the Korova there was a fair number of vecks and ptitsas and devotchkas and malchicks smecking and peeting away, and cutting through their govoreeting and the burbling of the in-the-landers with their ‘Gorgor fallatuke and the worm sprays in filltip slaughterballs’ and all that cal you could slooshy a pop-disc on the stereo, this being Ned Achimota singing ‘That Day, Yeah, That Day’.  At the counter were three devotchkas dressed in the heighth of nadsat fashion, that is to say long uncombed hair dyed white and false groodies sticking out a metre or more and very very tight short skirts with all like frothy white underneath, and Bully kept saying: ‘Hey, get in there we could, three of us.  Old Len is not interested.  Leave old Len alone with his God.’  And Len kept saying: ‘Yarbles yarbles.  Where is the spirit of all for one and one for all, eh boy?’  Suddenly I felt both very very tired and also full of tingly energy, and I said:

‘Out out out out out.’

‘Where to?’ said Rick, who had a litso like a frog’s.

‘Oh, just to viddy what’s doing in the great outside, ’I said.  But somehow, my brothers, I felt very bored and a bit hopeless, and I had been feeling that a lot these days.  So I turned to the chelloveck nearest me on the big plush seat that ran right round the whole mesto, a chelloveck, that is, who was burbling away under the influence, and I fisted him real skorry ack ack ack in the belly.  But he felt it not, brothers, only burbling away with his ‘Cart cart virtue, where in toptails lieth the poppoppicorns?’  So we scatted out into the big winter nochy.

We walked down Marghanita Boulevard and there were no millicents patrolling that way, so when we met a starry veck coming away from a news-kiosk where he had been kupetting a gazetta I said to Bully: ‘All right, Bully boy, thou canst if thou like wishest.’  More and more these days I had been just giving the orders and standing back to viddy them being carried out.  So Bully cracked into him er er er, and the other two tripped him and kicked at him, smecking away, while he was down and then let him crawl off to where he lived, like whimpering to himself.  Bully said:

‘How about a nice yummy glass of something to keep out the cold, O Alex?’  For we were not too far from the Duke of New York.  The other two nodded yes yes yes but all looked at me to viddy whether that was all right.  I nodded too and so off we ittied.  Inside the snug there were these starry ptitsas or sharps or baboochkas you will remember from the beginning and they all started on their: ‘Evening, lads, God bless you, boys, best lads living, that’s what you are,’ waiting for us to say ‘What’s it going to be girls?’ Bully rang the collocoll and a waiter came in rubbing his rookers on his grazzy apron. ‘Cutter on the table, droogies,’ said Bully, pulling out his own rattling and chinking mound of deng.  ‘Scotchmen for us and the same for the old baboochkas, eh?’  And then I said:

‘Ah, to hell.  Let them buy their own.’ I didn’t know what it was, but these last days I had become like mean.  There had come into my gulliver a like desire to keep all my pretty polly to myself, to like hoard it all up for some reason.  Bully said:

‘What gives, bratty?  What’s coming over old Alex?’

‘Ah, to hell,’ I said.  ‘I don’t know.  I don’t know.  What it is is I don’t like just throwing away my hard-earned pretty polly, that’s what it is.’

‘Earned?’ said Rick.  ‘Earned?  It doesn’t have to be earned, as well thou knowest, old droogie.  Took, that’s all, just took, like.’  And he smecked real gromky and I viddied one or two of his zoobies weren’t all that horrorshow.

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I’ve got some thinking to do.’ But viddying these baboochkas looking all eager like for some free alc, I like shrugged my pletchoes and pulled out my own cutter from my trouser carman, notes and coin all mixed together, and plonked it tinkle crackle on the table.

‘Scotchmen all round, right,’ said the waiter.  But for some reason I said:

‘No, boy, for me make it one small beer, right.’ Len said:

‘This I do not much go for,’ and he began to put his rooker on my gulliver, like kidding I must have fever, but I like snarled doggy-wise for him to give over skorry.  ‘All right, all right, droog,’ he said.  ‘As thou like sayest.’ But Bully was having a smot with his rot open at something that had come out of my carman with the pretty polly I’d put on the table.  He said:

‘Well well well.  And we never knew.’

‘Give me that,’ I snarled and grabbed it skorry.  I couldn’t explain how it had got there, brothers, but it was a photograph I had scissored out of the old gazetta and it was of a baby.  It was of a baby gurgling goo goo goo with all like moloko dribbling from its rot and looking up and like smecking at everybody, and its was all nagoy and its flesh was like in all folds with being a very fat baby.  There was then like a bit of haw haw haw struggling to get hold of this bit of paper from me, so I had to snarl again at them and I grabbed the photo and tore it up into tiny teeny pieces and let it fall like a bit of snow on to the floor.  The whisky came in then and the starry baboochkas said: ‘Good health, lads, God bless you, boys, the best lads living, that’s what you are,’ and all that cal.  And one of them who was all lines and wrinkles and no zoobies in her shrunken old rot said: ‘Don’t tear up money, son.  If you don’t need it give it them as does,’ which was very bold and forward of her.  But Rick said:

‘Money that was not, O baboochka.  It was a picture of a dear little itsy witsy bitsy bit of a baby.’ I said:

‘I’m getting just that bit tired, that I am.  It’s you who’s the babies, you lot.  Scoffing and grinning and all you can do is smeck and give people bolshy cowardly tolchocks when they can’t give them back.’ Bully said:

‘Well now, we always thought it was you who was the king of that and also the teacher.  Not well, that’s the trouble with thou, old droogie.’

I viddied this sloppy glass of beer I had on the table in front of me and felt like all vomity within, so I went ‘Aaaaah’ and poured all the frothy vonny cal all over the floor.  One of the starry ptitsas said:

‘Waste not want not.’ I said:

‘Look, droogies.  Listen.  Tonight I am somehow just not in the mood.  I know not why or how it is, but there it is.  You three go your own ways this nightwise, leaving me out.  Tomorrow we shall meet same place same time, me hoping to be like a lot better.’

‘Oh,’ said Bully, ‘right sorry I am.’ But you could viddy a like gleam in his glazzies, because now he would be taking over for this nochy.  Power power, everybody like wants power.  ‘We can postpone till tomorrow,’ said Bully. ‘what we in mind had.  Namely, that bit of shopcrasting in Gagarin Street.  Flip horrorshow takings there, droog, for the having.’

‘No,’ I said.  ‘You postpone nothing.  You just carry on in your own like style.  Now,’ I said, ‘I itty off.’  And I got up from my chair.

‘Where to, then?’ asked Rick.

‘That know I not,’ I said.  ‘Just to be on like my own and sort things out.’  You could viddy the old baboochkas were real puzzled at me going out like that and like all morose and not the bright and smecking malchickiwick you will remember.  But I said: ‘Ah, to hell, to hell,’ and scatted out all on my oddy knocky into the street.

It was dark and there was a wind sharp as a nozh getting up, and there were very very few lewdies about.  There were these patrol cars with brutal rozzes inside them like cruising about, and now and then on the corner you would viddy a couple of very young millicents stamping against the bitchy cold and letting out steam breath on the winter air, O my brothers.  I suppose really a lot of the old ultra-violence and crasting was dying out now, the rozzes being so brutal with who they caught, though it had become like a fight between naughty nadsats and the rozzes who could be more skorry with the nozh and the britva and the stick and even the gun.  But what was the matter with me these days was that I didn’t like care much.  It was like something soft getting into me and I could not pony why.  What I wanted these days I did not know.  Even the music I liked to slooshy in my own malenky den what what I would have smecked at before, brothers.  I was slooshying more like malenky romantic songs, what they call Lieder, just a goloss and a piano, very quiet and like yearny, different from when it had been all bolshy orchestras and me lying on the bed between the violins and the trombones and kettledrums.  There was something happening inside me, and I wondered if it was like some disease or if it was what they had done to me that time upsetting my gulliver and perhaps going to make me real bezoomny.

So thinking like this with my gulliver bent and my rookers stuck in my trouser carmans I walked the town, brothers, and at last I began to feel very tired and also in great need of a nice bolshy chasha of milky chai.  Thinking about this chai, I got a sudden like picture of me sitting before a bolshy fire in an armchair peeting away at this chai, and what was funny and very very strange was that I seemed to have turned into a very starry chelloveck, about seventy years old, because I could viddy my own voloss, which was very grey, and I also had whiskers, and these were very grey too.  I could viddy myself as an old man, sitting by a fire, and then the like picture vanished.  But it was very like strange.

I came to one of these tea-and-coffee mestos, brothers, and I could viddy through the long long window that it was full of very dull lewdies, like ordinary, who had these very patient and expressionless litsos and would do no harm to no one, all sitting there and govoreeting like quietly and peeting away at their nice harmless chai and coffee.  I ittied inside and went up to the counter and bought me a nice hot chai with plenty of moloko, then I ittied to one of these tables and sat down to peet it.  There was a like young couple at this table, peeting and smoking filter-tip cancers, and govoreeting and smecking very quietly between themselves, but I took no notice of them and just went on peeting away and like dreaming and wondering what it was in me that was like changing and what was going to happen to me.  But I viddied that the devotchka at this table who was with this chelloveck was real horrorshow, not the sort you would want to like throw down and give the old in-out in-out to, but with a horrorshow plott and litso and a smiling rot and very very fair voloss and all that cal.  And then the veck with her, who had a hat on his gulliver and had his litso like turned away from me, swivelled round to viddy the bolshy big clock they had on the wall in this mesto, and then I viddied who he was and then he viddied who I was.  It was Pete, one of my three droogs from those days when it was Georgie and Dim and him and me.  It was Pete like looking a lot older though he could not now be more than nineteen and a bit, and he had a bit of a moustache and an ordinary day-suit and this hat on.  I said:

‘Well well well, droogie, what gives?  Very very long time no viddy.’ He said:

‘It’s little Alex, isn’t it?’

‘None other,’ I said.  ‘A long long long time since those dead and gone good days.  And now poor Georgie, they told me, is underground and old Dim is a brutal millicent, and here is thou and here is I, and what news hast thou, old droogie?’

‘He talks funny, doesn’t he?’ said this devotchka, like giggling.

‘This, said Pete to the devotchka, ‘is an old friend.  His name is Alex.  May I,’ he said to me, ‘introduce my wife?’

My rot fell wide open then.  ‘Wife?’ I like gaped. ‘Wife wife wife? Ah no, that cannot be.  Too young art thou to be married, old droog.  Impossible impossible.’

This devotchka who was like Pete’s wife (impossible impossible) giggled again and said to Pete: ‘Did you used to talk like that too?’

‘Well,’ said Pete, and he like smiled.  ‘I’m nearly twenty.  Old enough to be hitched, and it’s been two months already.  You were very young and very forward, remember.’

‘Well,’ I liked gaped still. ‘Over this get can I not, old droogie.  Pete married.  Well well well.’

‘We have a small flat,’ said Pete.  ‘I am earning very small money at State Marine Insurance, but things will get better, that I know.  And Georgina here-‘

‘What again is that name?’ I said, rot still open like bezoomny.  Pete’s wife.  (wife, brothers) like giggled again.

‘Georgina,’ said Pete.  ‘Georgina works too.  Typing, you know.  We manage, we manage.’ I could not, brothers, take my glazzies off him, really.  He was like grown up now, with a grown-up goloss and all.  ‘You must,’ said Pete, ‘come and see us sometime.  You still,’ he said, ‘look very young, despite all your terrible experiences.  Yes, yes, yes, we’ve read all about them.  But, of course, you are very young still.’

‘Eighteen,’ I said, ‘Just gone.’

‘Eighteen, eh?’ said Pete.  ‘As old as that.  Well well well. Now,’ he said, ‘we have to be going.’ And he like gave this Georgina of his a like loving look and pressed one of her rookers between his and she gave him one of these looks back, O my brothers.  ‘Yes,’ said Pete, turning back to me, ‘we’re off to a little party at Greg’s.’

‘Greg?’ I said.

‘Oh, of course,’ said Pete, ‘you wouldn’t know Greg, would you?  Greg is after your time.  While you were away Greg came into the picture.  He runs little parties, you know.  Mostly wine-cup and word-games.  But very nice, very pleasant, you know.  Harmless, if you see what I mean.’

‘Yes,’ I said.  ‘Harmless.  Yes, yes, I viddy that real horrorshow.’  And this Georgina devotchka giggled again at my slovos.  And then these two ittied off to their vonny word-games at this Greg’s, whoever he was.  I was left all on my oddy knocky with my milky chai, which was getting cold now, like thinking and wondering.

Perhaps that was it, I kept thinking.  Perhaps I was getting too old for the sort of jeezny I had been leading, brothers.  I was eighteen now, just gone.  Eighteen was not a young age.  At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music.  And then there was old Felix M. with his Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture.  And there were others.  And there was this like French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers.  Arthur, his first name.  Eighteen was not all that young an age, then.  But what was I going to do?

Walking the dark chill bastards of winter streets after ittying off from this chai-and-coffee mesto, I kept viddying like visions, like these cartoons in the gazettas.  There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa all welcoming and greeting like loving.  But I could not viddy her all that horrorshow, brothers, I could not think who it might be.  But I had this sudden very strong idea that if I walked into the room next to this room where the fire was burning away and my hot dinner laid on the table, there I should find what I really wanted, and now it all tied up, that picture scissored out of the gazetta and meeting old Pete like that.  For in that other room in a cot was laying gurgling goo goo goo my son.  Yes yes yes, brothers, my son.  And now I felt this bolshy big hollow inside my plott, feeling very surprised too at myself.  I knew what was happening, O my brothers.  I was like growing up.

Yes yes yes, there it was.  Youth must go, ah yes.  But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal.  No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers.  But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing.  Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

My son, my son.  When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand.  But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him.  And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers.  And so it would itty on until like the end of the world, round and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself (by courtesy of Korova Milkbar) turning and turning and turning a vonny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers.

But first of all, brothers, there was this veshch of finding some devotchka or other who would be a mother to this son.  I would have to start on that tomorrow, I kept thinking.  That was something like new to do.  That was something I would have to get started on, a new like chapter beginning.

That’s what it’s going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale.  You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex.  And all it was was that I was young.  But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no.  Alex like groweth up, oh yes.

But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go.  Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate.  And all that cal.  A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers.  And so farewell from your little droog.  And to all others in this story profound shooms of lipmusic brrrrrr.  And they can kiss my sharries.  But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was.  Amen.  And all that cal.

Glossary of Nadsat Language

Words that do not appear to be of Russian origin are distinguished

by asterisks.  (For help with the Russian, I am indebted to the kind-

ness of my colleague Nora Montesinos and a number of correspon-

dents.)

*appy polly loggy - apology             choodesny - wonderful

 baboochka - old woman                 *chumble - to mumble

*baddiwad - bad                         clop - to knock

 banda - band                           cluve - beak

 bezoomny - mad                         collocoll - bell

 biblio - library                      *crack - to break up or 'bust'

 bitva - battle                        *crark - to yowl?

 Bog - God                              crast - to steal or rob;

 bolnoy - sick                                  robbery

 bolshy - big, great                    creech - to shout or scream

 brat, bratty - brother                *cutter - money

 bratchny - bastard                     dama - lady

 britva - razor                         ded - old man

 brooko - belly                         deng - money

 brosay - to throw                      devotchka - girl

 bugatty - rich                         dobby - good

 cal - feces                           *dook - trace, ghost

*cancer - cigarette                     domy - house

 cantora - office                       dorogoy - dear, valuable

 carman - pocket                        dratsing - fighting

 chai - tea                            *drencrom - drug

*charles, charlie - chaplain            droog - friend

 chasha - cup                          *dung - to defecate

 chasso - guard                         dva - two

 cheena - woman                         eegra - game

 cheest - to wash                       eemya - name

 chelloveck - person, man,             *eggiweg - egg

              fellow                   *filly - to play or fool with

 chepooka - nonsense                   *firegold - drink

*fist - to punch                        loveted - caught

*flip - wild?                           lubbilubbing - making love

 forella - 'trout'                     *luscious glory - hair

 gazetta - newspaper                    malchick - boy

 glazz - eye                            malenky - little, tiny

 gloopy - stupid                        maslo - butter

*golly - unit of money                  merzky - filthy

 goloss - voice                         messel - thought, fancy

 goober - lip                           mesto - place

 gooly - to walk                        millicent - policeman

 gorlo - throat                         minoota - minute

 govoreet - to speak or talk            molodoy - young

 grahzny - dirty                        moloko - milk

 grazzy - soiled                        moodge - man

 gromky - loud                          morder - snout

 groody - breast                       *mounch - snack

 gruppa - group                         mozg - brain

*guff - guffaw                          nachinat - to begin

 gulliver - head                        nadmenny - arrogant

*guttiwuts - guts                       nadsat - teenage

*hen-korm - chickenfeed                 nagoy - naked

*horn - to cry out                     *nazz - fool

 horrorshow - good, well                neezhnies - underpants

*in-out in-out - copulation             nochy - night

 interessovat - to interest             hoga - foot, leg

 itty - to go                           nozh - knife

*jammiwam - jam                         nuking - smelling

 jeezny - life                          oddy knocky - lonesome

 kartoffel - potato                     odin - one

 keeshkas - guts                        okno - window

 kleb - bread                           oobivat - to kill

 klootch - key                          ookadeet - to leave

 knopka - button                        ooko - ear

 kopat - to 'dig'                       oomny - brainy

 koshka - cat                           oozhassny - terrible

 kot - tomcat                           oozy - chain

 krovvy - blood                         osoosh - to wipe

 kupet - to buy                         otchkies - eyeglasses

 lapa - paw                            *pan-handle - erection

 lewdies - people                      *pee and em - parents

*lighter - crone?                       peet - to drink

 litso - face                           pishcha - food

 lomtick, piece, bit                    platch - to cry

 platties - clothes                    *shlaga - club

 pletcho - shoulder                     shlapa - hat

 plenny - prisoner                      shoom - noise

 plesk - splash                         shoot - fool

*plosh - to splash                     *sinny - cinema

 plott - body                           skazat - to say

 podooshka - pillow                    *skolliwoll - school

 pol - sex                              skorry - quick, quickly

 polezny - useful                      *skriking - scratching

*polyclef - skeleton key                skvat - to grab

 pony - to understand                   sladky - sweet

 poogly - frightened                    sloochat - to happen

 pooshka - 'cannon'                     sloosh, slooshy - to hear, to

 prestoopnick - criminal                                  listen

 privodeet - to lead                    slovo - word

             somewhere                  smeck - laugh

*pretty polly - money                   smot - to look

 prod - to produce                      sneety - dream

 ptitsa - 'chick'                      *snoutie - tobacco?

 pyahnitsa - drunk                     *snuff it - to die

 rabbit - work, job                     sobirat - to pick up

 radosty - joy                         *sod - to fornicate, fornicator

 raskazz - story                        soomka - 'bag'

 rassoodock - mind                      soviet - advice, order

 raz - time                             spat - to sleep

 razdraz - upset                       *splodge, splosh - splash

 razrez - to rip, ripping              *spoogy - terrified

 rook, rooker - hand, arm              *Staja - State Jail

 rot - mouth                            starry - ancient

 rozz - policeman                       strack - horror

 sabog - shoe                          *synthemesc - drug

 sakar - sugar                          tally - waist

 sammy - generous                      *tashtook - handkerchief

*sarky - sarcastic                     *tass - cup

 scoteena - 'cow'                       tolchock - to hit or push; blow,

 shaika - gang                                     beating

*sharp - female                         toofles - slippers

 sharries - buttocks                    tree - three

 shest - barrier                        vareet - to 'cook up'

*shilarny - concern                    *vaysay - washroom

*shive - slice                          veck - (see chelloveck)

 shiyah - neck                         *vellocet - drug

 shlem - helmet                         veshch - thing

 viddy - to see or look                 yeckate - to drive

 voloss - hair                         *warble - song

 von - smell                            zammechat - remarkable

 vred - to harm or damage               zasnoot - sleep

 yahma - hole                           zheena - wife

*yahoodies - Jews                       zoobies - teeth

 yahzick - tongue                       zvonock - bellpull

*yarbles - testicles                    zvook - sound

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Glossary of Nadsat Language