'What’s it going to be then, eh?’ There was me, that is Alex, and my thiee 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 flip dark chill winter bastard though dry The Korova 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 hcence for selling hquor, 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 fifteen minutes admirmg 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 peering this evening I’m start- ing off 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 fom, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering stany grey-haired ptitsa m a shop and go smeckmg off with the tiirs guts But, as they say, money isn't eveiy thing The four of us were dressed in the heighth of fashion, which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with the old ]elly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crutch underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of a design you could viddy clear enough in a cer- tain 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 flower, 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, 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 off-white cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud with a sort of a design made on it with a fork. We woie our hair not too long and we had flip 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 aU and all for one. These sharps were dressed m the heighth of fashion too, with purple and green and orange wigs on their gulhvers, each one not cost- ing 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 different malchicks’ names on them -Joe and Mike and suchlike These were supposed to be the names of the different malchicks they’d spatted with before they weie fourteen. They kept looking our way and I nearly felt like saying the three of us (out of the comer of
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