"Энтони Берджес. Механический апельсин (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

for one. These sharps were dressed in the heighth of fashion too, with
purple and green and orange wigs on their gullivers, each one not costing
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 were
fourteen. They kept looking our way and I nearly felt like saying the three
of us (out of the corner of my rot, that is) should go off for a bit of pol
and leave poor old Dim behind, because it would be just a matter of
kupetting Dim a demi-litre of white but this time with a dollop of
synthemesc in it, but that wouldn't really have been playing like the game.
Dim was very very ugly and like his name, but he was a horrorshow filthy
fighter and very handy with the boot.
"What's it going to be then, eh?"
The chelloveck sitting next to me, there being this long big plushy
seat that ran round three walls, was well away with his glazzies glazed and
sort of burbling slovos like "Aristotle wishy washy works outing cyclamen
get forficulate smartish." He was in the land all right, well away, in
orbit, and I knew what it was like, having tried it like everybody else had
done, but at this time I'd got to thinking it was a cowardly sort of a
veshch, O my brothers. You'd lay there after you'd drunk the old moloko and
then you got the messel that everything all round you was sort of in the
past. You could viddy it all right, all of it, very clear--tables, the
stereo, the lights, the sharps and the malchicks--but it was like some
veshch that used to be there but was not there not no more. And you were
sort of hypnotized by your boot or shoe or a finger-nail as it might be, and
at the same time you were sort of picked up by the old scruff and shook like
you might be a cat. You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You
lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care, and you
waited until your boot or finger-nail got yellow, then yellower and yellower
all the time. Then the lights started cracking like atomics and the boot or
finger-nail or, as it might be, a bit of dirt on your trouser-bottom turned
into a big big big mesto, bigger than the whole world, and you were just
going to get introduced to old Bog or God when it was all over. You came
back to here and now whimpering sort of, with your rot all squaring up for a
boohoohoo. Now that's very nice but very cowardly. You were not put on this
earth just to get in touch with God. That sort of thing could sap all the
strength and the goodness out of a chelloveck.
"What's it going to be then, eh?"
The stereo was on and you got the idea that the singer's goloss was
moving from one part of the bar to another, flying up to the ceiling and
then swooping down again and whizzing from wall to wall. It was Berti Laski
rasping a real starry oldie called `You Blister My Paint.' One of the three
ptitsas at the counter, the one with the green wig, kept pushing her belly
out and pulling it in in time to what they called the music. I could feel
the knives in the old moloko starting to prick, and now I was ready for a
bit of twenty-to-one. So I yelped: "Out out out out!" like a doggie, and
then I cracked this veck who was sitting next to me and well away and