A Clockwork Orange - Burgess, Anthony [15]
“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 patronizing 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