A Clockwork Orange - Burgess, Anthony [2]
“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 municipality, 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