Part 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 ip 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 vellocet
or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches
which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fteen
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 evening
I'm starting o 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 o 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, tting 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 ower, 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,
1
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 o-white
cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoel or spud with a
sort of a design made on it with a fork. We wore our hair not
too long and we had ip 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 dierent malchicks'
names on them - Joe and Mike and suchlike. These were supposed
to be the names of the dierent 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 o 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 lthy ghter 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 forculate 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