Fight with Billyboy's Gang
The Fight with Billyboy's Gang is the most sustained and ritualized act of ultra-violence in Alex's early career, a set-piece battle that pits four droogs against six enemies near the Municipal Power Plant on a winter night. It interrupts a sexual assault on a ten-year-old girl, escalates into a knife-and-chain melee under the rising moon, and ends with police sirens scattering both gangs. The fight crystallizes Alex's leadership, his aestheticized cruelty, and the fragile loyalties that will soon destroy him.
Causes and Background
The fight erupts not from a territorial dispute but from a chance encounter. Alex and his three droogs—Pete, Georgie, and Dim—are roaming the streets after their earlier attacks on an old professor and a drunk, their blood still up from the "knives in the milk" they drank at the Korova Milkbar. They come across Billyboy and his five droogs near the Municipal Power Plant, where the rival gang has already cornered a weeping young girl "not more than ten" and is preparing to perform on her. Billyboy, whom Alex despises for his "fat grinning litso" and the permanent smell of stale frying oil, is holding one of the girl's hands while his number-one, Leo, holds the other. The girl's thin white legs flash through the dark as she cries "Oh oh oh." When Billyboy's gang sees Alex's crew approaching, they release the girl—"there being plenty more where she came from"—and she runs off into the night. Alex greets Billyboy with a stream of elaborate insults: "Well, if it isn't fat stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou." Then the fight begins.
What Happens
The battle is four against six, but Alex notes that Dim, for all his dimness, is "worth three of the others in sheer madness and dirty fighting." Dim unwinds a length of chain from around his waist and swings it "beautiful in the eyes or glazzies." Pete and Georgie draw sharp knives, while Alex produces his "fine starry horrorshow cut-throat britva," which he can "flash and shine artistic." The fight takes place in the dark, with the moon—"the old Luna with men on it"—just coming up and the stars "stabbing away as it might be knives anxious to join in the dratsing." Alex uses his britva to slit down the front of one of Billyboy's droogs' clothes "very very neat and not even touching the plott under the cloth," so that the droog suddenly finds himself "all opened up like a peapod, with his belly bare and his poor old yarbles showing." The man becomes razdraz, waving and screaming and losing his guard, and Dim chains him right in the glazzies, sending him "tottering off and howling his heart out." Soon Billyboy's number-one, Leo, is down underfoot, blinded by Dim's chain and crawling "about like an animal," until one fair boot on the gulliver puts him "out and out and out." Alex then focuses on Billyboy himself, dancing about with his britva "like I might be a barber on board a ship on a very rough sea," trying to get in at him with "a few fair slashes on his unclean oily litso." Billyboy has a long flick-type knife but is "a malenky bit too slow and heavy in his movements to vred anyone really bad." Alex waltzes—"left two three, right two three"—and carves "left cheeky and right cheeky," so that two curtains of blood pour out at the same time, one on either side of Billyboy's "fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight." Billyboy feels nothing and keeps lumbering on "like a filthy fatty bear, poking at me with his nozh." The fight is interrupted by police sirens; the weeping little girl has called the rozzes from a box near the Power Plant. Alex shouts, "Get you soon, fear not, stinking billygoat. I'll have your yarbles off lovely," and both gangs scatter—Billyboy's crew running north toward the river, Alex's crew heading the other way into a dark alley.
Consequences and Aftermath
The fight has immediate and long-term consequences. Alex and his droogs rest in an alley between two enormous flatblocks, watching the blue light of the worldcast television in the windows, and Dim looks up at the stars with his mouth open like a kid, asking, "What's on them, I wonder. What would be up there on things like that?" Alex dismisses him: "Come, gloopy bastard as thou art. Think thou not on them. There'll be life like down here most likely, with some getting knifed and others doing the knifing." The fight also leaves a trail that the authorities can follow. The next day, P. R. Deltoid, Alex's Post-Corrective Adviser, warns him that "one of a certain fat boy's friends was ambulanced off late from near the Power Plant and hospitalized, cut about very unpleasantly," and that Alex's name was mentioned. More significantly, the fight deepens the cracks in Alex's gang. Dim comes out of the battle looking the worst—his litso bloodied, his clothes a dirty mess—while the others remain "cool and whole." Alex's contempt for Dim's sloppiness and his own sense of superiority grow, setting the stage for the later confrontation in the Korova Milkbar where Alex punches Dim for his vulgarity, and for Dim's eventual betrayal when he chains Alex's eyes during the cat-lady robbery. The fight also establishes Alex's signature weapon and style: the cut-throat britva used with artistic precision, a motif that recurs when he later slashes Georgie's hand to reassert leadership and when, during the Ludovico demonstration, he is unable to use the same britva against a provocateur. The fight with Billyboy's gang is the last moment of pure, uncomplicated violent joy for Alex—before betrayal, prison, and the Ludovico Technique strip him of the ability to choose.
