the whole room is screaming with Elias and his Zigzag Jive Flutes

epub or mobi

'Tell you what it is - only you probably wouldn't understand, being a stuck-up ponce and a Chelsea baron - it's all down to Glad having to have it off with ice-creams all the time down to wages when she doesn't want it. You know what it is. Glad and me, we're caught up in this endless grind of her charvering an' me deviating, and she's not so young now, thirty-four. You don't know what it's like, havin' to go on the batter day in an' day out and havin' to open up for 'em all - big ones, thin ones, malts, spades, bubbles, and the queans that beat 'er black an' blue. It's one thing when you're a kid of sixteen but glad, she's a big girl now. Mind, it wasn't like that all the time; time was when she 'ad a right little gaff an' she was the madam an' it was all down to beatin' punters or she'd get bird in from outside to take the wacks for a tenner. But then she got nicked for a carpet and when she got out, of course, the old clients 'ad all scarpered, you know how it is. And that's not all; just the other day she gets nicked along Piccy day before she's due to go in for cat's meat, an' under the new Act that's a pony and she's only got five more days to pay and I don't know where it's going to come from, morrie, and that's straight up and down I don't. And she's twenty-two carat, Glad is; you should've seen how she used to come an' slip me snout when I was over at the ville.'

quite often at snap parties you get this sort of thing happening - after you've had, say, five ampoules and you feel your head swelling like a balloon glass and your heart going like the hammers - you lamp someone, maybe it's a stranger, and you get the feeling you've got to laugh so strong that it's ludicrous and you just let it out because you'd burst otherwise, which is the whole point about snap, I suppose: you just don't give a damn. And laughter like that spreads at snap parties till the gaff's filled with the roar of voices and drinking and glasses breaking and ampoules snapping and over it all this insane laughter, and presently some geezer starts undressing or a fat man goes off on a transvestite kick and comes down wearing Mrs Marengo's floppy hat and doing a Spanish dance on greasy old scotches. But if there's a person there who hasn't been taking it you can get a nasty situation and you want to watch out, when and if you get snapped up for the first time, that you don't hand out too much aggravation and get yourself well thumped.