A Clockwork Orange - Burgess, Anthony [73]
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