A Clockwork Orange - Burgess, Anthony [59]
“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.
A Clockwork Orange
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