Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Alan Sillitoe
doin’, can’t yer? Yo’ an’ yer bloody grett clod-‘oppers.’ He turned to the waiter: ‘Some people love comin’ out on a Saturday night in their pit-boots.’
The man turned from halfway up the stairs: ‘You shouldn’t go to sleep in everybody’s way. Can’t tek the drink, that’s what’s the matter wi’ yo’ young ‘uns.’
‘That’s what yo’ think,’ Arthur retaliated, pulling himself up by the stair-rail and holding firmly on to it.
‘You’ll have to go out, you know,’ the waiter said sadly, as if he had donned a black cap to pronounce sentence. ‘We can’t serve you any more ale in that condition.’
‘There’s nowt wrong wi’ me,’ Arthur exclaimed, recognizing a situation of extreme peril.
‘No,’ the waiter retorted, coolly sarcastic, ‘I know there ain’t, but it’s a bit thick, you know, getting drunk like this.’
Arthur denied that he was drunk, speaking so clearly that the waiter was inclined to believe him.
‘Have a fag, mate,’ he said, and lit both cigarettes with a perfectly calm hand. ‘You must be busy tonight,’ he suggested, so sanely that he might just have walked in off the street and not yet sipped a shandy.
His remark touched the waiter’s grievance. ‘Not much we aren’t. I’m so tired I can’t feel my feet. These Saturday nights’ll be the death o’ me.’
‘It ain’t what yer might call a good job,’ Arthur said with sympathy.
‘Well, it’s not that exactly,’ the waiter began to complain, friendly and confiding all of a sudden. ‘It’s because we’re short of staff. Nobody’ll take on a job like this, you know, and …’
The publican came out of the saloon door, a small wiry man in a pin-striped suit whom no one would know as a publican unless they recognized the slight cast of authority and teetotalness in his right eye. ‘Come on, Jim,’ he said sharply. ‘I don’t pay my waiters to talk to their pals. You know it’s a busy night. Get back upstairs and keep ‘em happy.’
Jim nodded towards Arthur: ‘This bloke here’ — but the publican was already carrying his fanatic stare to another department, and so the waiter saw no point in going on. He shrugged his shoulders and obeyed the order, leaving Arthur free to walk into the saloon bar.
Fixing an iron-grip on the brass rail, he shouted for a pint, the only sufficient liquid measure that could begin to swill away the tasteless ash-like thirst at the back of his mouth. After the rapid disposal of the pint, so long in coming, he would bluff his way back upstairs, dodge the waiter, and rejoin Brenda, the woman he had been sitting with before his fall. He could not believe that the descending frolic of the stairs had happened to him. His memory acted at first like a beneficial propaganda machine, a retainer and builder of morale, saying that he could not have been so drunk and rolled down the stairs in that way, and that what had really happened, yes, this was it for sure, was that he must have walked down and fallen asleep on the bottom step. It could happen to anybody, especially if they had been at work all day, standing near a capstan lathe in the dull roar of the turnery department. Yet this explanation was too tame. Perhaps he really had tripped down a few of the stairs; yes, he distinctly remembered bumping a few steps.
For the third time he demanded a pint. His eyes were glazed with fatigue, and he would have let go of the bar-rail had not an ever-ready instinct of self-preservation leapt into his fist at the weakest moment and forced him to tighten his grip. He was beginning to feel sick, and in fighting this temptation his tiredness increased. He did not know whether he would go back upstairs to Brenda afterwards, or have his pint and get home to bed, the best place when you feel done-in, he muttered to himself.
The bartender placed a pint before him. He paid one-and-eightpence and drank it almost in a single gulp. His strength magically returned, and he shouted out for another, thinking: the thirteenth. Unlucky for some, but we’ll see how it turns out. He received the pint and drank a little more slowly, but halfway through it, the temptation to be sick became a necessity that beat insistently against the back of his throat. He fought if off and struggled to light a cigarette.
Smoke caught in his windpipe and he had just time enough to push his way back through the crush — nudging his elbow into standing people who unknowingly blocked his way, half choked by smoke now issuing from mouth and nostrils, feeling strangely taken up by a fierce power that he could not control — before he gave way to the temptation that had stood by him since falling down the stairs, and emitted a belching roar over a middle-aged man sitting with a woman on one of the green leather seats.
‘My God!’ the man cried. ‘Look at this. Look at what the young bogger’s gone and done. Would you believe it? My best suit. Only pressed and cleaned today. Who would credit such a thing? Oh dear. It cost me fifteen bob. As if money grows on trees. And suits as well. I wonder how I’ll ever get the stains out? Oh dear.’
His whining voice went on for several minutes, and those who turned to look expected him with every word to break down into piteous sobs.
Arthur was stupefied, unable to believe that the tragedy before him could by any means be connected with himself and the temptation to which he had just given way. Yet through the haze and smoke and shrill reproaches coming from the man’s lady-friend, he gathered that he was to blame and that he should be feeling sorry for what had happened.
He stood up straight, rigid, swaying slightly, his eyes gleaming, his overcoat open. Automatically he felt for another cigarette, but remembering in time what his attempt to smoke the last one had caused, gave up the search and dropped his hands by his side.
‘Look what yer’ve done, yer young bleeder,’ the woman was shouting at him. ‘Spewed all over Alf’s bes’ suit. And all you do is jus’ stand there. Why don’t yer do something? Eh? Why don’t yer’t least apologize for what yer’ve done?’
‘Say summat, mate,’ an onlooker called, and by the tone of his voice Arthur sensed that the crowd was not on his side, though he was unable to speak and defend himself. He looked at the woman, who continued shouting directly at him, while the victim fumbled ineffectually with a handkerchief trying to clean his suit.
The woman stood a foot away from Arthur. ‘Look at him,’ she jeered into his face. ‘He’s senseless. He can’t say a word. He can’t even apologize. Why don’t yer apologize, eh? Can’t yer apologize? Dragged-up, I should think, getting drunk like this. Looks like one of them Teddy boys, allus making trouble. Go on, apologize.’
From her constant use of the word apologize it seemed as if she had either just learned its meaning — perhaps after a transmission breakdown on television — or as if she had first learned to say it by spelling it out with coloured bricks at school forty years ago.
‘Apologize,’ she cried, her maniacal face right against him. ‘Go on, apologize.’
The beast inside Arthur’s stomach gripped him again, and suddenly, mercilessly, before he could stop it or move out of the way, or warn anybody that it was coming, it leapt out of his mouth with an appalling growl.
She was astonished. Through the haze her face clarified. Arthur saw teeth between open lips, narrowed eyes, claws raised. She was a tigress.
He saw nothing else. Before she could spring he gathered all his strength and pushed through the crowd, impelled by a strong sense of survival towards the street-door, to take himself away from a scene of ridicule, disaster, and certain retribution.
He knocked softly on the front door of Brenda’s house. No answer. He had expected that. The kids were asleep, her husband Jack was at Long Eaton for the races — dog, horse, motor-bike — and not due back until Sunday midday, and Brenda had stayed at the pub. Now sitting on her front doorstep he remembered his journey to the house: a vague memory of battles with lampposts and walls and kerb stones, of knocking into people who told him to watch his step and threatened to drop him one, voices of anger and the hard unsympathetic stones of houses and pavements.
It