Three Score & Ten

‘We have a small flat,’ said Pete. ‘I am earning very small money at State Marine Insurance, but things will get better, that I know. And Georgina here – ‘

‘What again is that name?’ I said, rot still open like bezoomy. Pete’s wife (wife, brothers) like giggled again.

‘Georgina,’ said Pete. ‘Georgina works too. Typing, you know. We manage, we manage.’ I could not, my brothers, take my glazzies off him, really. He was like grown up now, with a grow-up goloss and all. ‘You must,’ said Pete, ‘come and see us sometime. You still,’ he said, ‘look very young, despite all your terrible experiences. Yes yes yes, we’ve read all about them. But, of course, you are very young still.’

‘Eighteen,’ I said. ‘Just gone.’

‘Eighteen, eh?’ said Pete. ‘As old as that. Well well well. Now,’ he said, ‘we have to be going.’ And he gave this Georgina of his a like loving look and pressed one her rookers between his and she gave him one these looks back, O my brothers. ‘Yes,’ said Pete, turning back to me, ‘we’re off to a little party at Greg’s.’

‘Greg?’ I said.

‘Oh, of course,’ said Pete, ‘you wouldn’t know Greg, would you? Greg is after your time. While you were away Greg came into the picture. He runs little parties, you know. Mostly wine-cup and word-games. But very nice, very pleasant, you know. Harmless, if you see what I mean.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Harmless. Yes, yes, I viddy that real horrorshow.’ And this Georgina devotcha giggled again at my slovos. And then these two ittied off to their vonny word-games at this Greg’s, whoever he was. I was left all on my oddy knocky with my milky chai, which was getting cold now, like thinking and wondering. Perhaps that was it, I kept thinking. Perhaps I was getting too old for the sort of jeezny I had been leading, brothers. I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no not cal, heavenly music. And there was old Felix M. with his Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. And there were others. And there was like this French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur was his first name. Eighteen was not that young an age, then. But what was I going to do?

 Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

I went into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colours of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening of her cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s