Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Alan Sillitoe

danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom.

      It was Benefit Night for the White Horse Club, and the pub had burst its contribution box and spread a riot through its rooms and between its four walls. Floors shook and windows rattled, and leaves of aspidistras wilted in the fumes of beer and smoke. Notts County had beaten the visiting team, and the members of the White Horse supporters club were quartered upstairs to receive a flow of victory. Arthur was not a member of the club, but Brenda was, and so he was drinking the share of her absent husband — as far as it would go — and when the club went bust and the shrewd publican put on the towels for those that couldn’t pay, he laid eight half-crowns on the table, intending to fork out for his own.

      For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of ‘be drunk and be happy’, kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.

      Brenda and two other women sitting at Arthur’s table saw him push back his chair and stand up with a clatter, his grey eyes filmed over so that he looked like a tall, thin Druid about to begin a maniacal dance. Instead, he muttered something that they were too tight or far away to understand, and walked unsteadily to the top stair. Many people looked at him as he held on to the rail. He turned his head in a slow stare around the packed room, as if he did not know which foot to move first in order to start his body on the descent, or even know why he wanted to go down the stairs at that particular moment.

      He felt electric light bulbs shining and burning into the back of his head, and sensed in the opening and closing flash of a second that his mind and body were entirely separate entities inconsiderately intent on going their different ways. For some reason, the loud, cracked voice singing in the room behind seemed like a signal that he should begin descending at once, so he put one foot forward, watched it turn towards the next step in a hazy fashion, and felt the weight of his body bending towards it until pressure from above became so great that he started rolling down the stairs.

      A high-octane fuel of seven gins and eleven pints had set him into motion like a machine, and had found its way into him because of a man’s boast. A big, loud-mouthed bastard who said he had been a sailor — so Arthur later summed him up — was throwing his weight about and holding dominion over several tables, telling his listeners of all the places he had been to in the world, each anecdote pointing to the fact that he was a champion boozer and the palliest bloke in the pub. He was forty and in his prime, with a gut not too much gone to fat, wearing a brown waist-coated suit and a shirt with matching stripes whose cuffs came down to the hairs of self-assurance on the back of his beefy hand.

      ‘Drink?’ Brenda’s friend exclaimed. ‘I’ll bet you can’t drink like young Arthur Seaton there’ — nodding to Arthur’s end of the table. ‘He’s on’y twenty-one and ’e can tek it in like a fish. I don’t know where ’e puts it all. It just goes in and in and you wonder when ‘is guts are goin’ ter go oust all over the room, but ‘e duzn’t even get fatter!’

      Loudmouth grunted and tried to ignore her eulogy, but at the end of a fiery and vivid description of a brothel in Alexandria he called over to Arthur: ‘I hear you drink a lot, matey?’

      Arthur didn’t like being called ‘matey’. It put his back up straight away. ‘Middlin’,’ he answered modestly. ‘Why?’

      ‘What’s the most you’ve ever drunk, then?’ Loudmouth wanted to know. ‘We used to have boozing matches on shore-leave,’ he added with a wide, knowing smile to the aroused group of spectators. He reminded Arthur of a sergeant-major who once put him on a charge.

      ‘I don’t know,’ Arthur told him. ‘I can’t count, you see.’

      ‘Well,’ Loudmouth rejoined, ‘let’s see how much you can drink now. Loser pays the bill.’

      Arthur did not hesitate. Free booze was free booze. Anyway, he begrudged big talkers their unearned glory, and hoped to show him up and take him down to his right size.

      Loudmouth’s tactics were skilful and sound, he had to admit that. Having won the toss-up for choice, he led off on gins, and after the seventh gin he switched to beer, pints. Arthur enjoyed the gins, and relished the beer. It seemed an even contest for a long time, as if they would sit there swilling it back for ever, until Loudmouth suddenly went green halfway through the tenth pint and had to rush outside. He must have paid the bill downstairs, because he didn’t come back. Arthur, as if nothing had happened, went back to his beer.

      He was laughing to himself as he rolled down the stairs, at the dull bumping going on behind his head and along his spine, as if it were happening miles away, like a vibration on another part of the earth’s surface, and he an earthquake-machine on which it was faintly recorded. This rolling motion was so restful and soporific, in fact, that when he stopped travelling, having arrived at the bottom of the stairs — he kept his eyes closed and went to sleep. It was a pleasant and far-away feeling, and he wanted to stay in exactly the same position for the rest of his life.

      Someone was poking him in the ribs: he recognized it not as the vicious poke of someone who had beaten him in a fight, or the gentle and playful poke of a woman whom he had taken to bed, but the tentative poke of a man who did not know whether he was poking the ribs of someone who might suddenly spring up and give him a bigger poke back. It seemed to Arthur that the man was endeavouring to tell him something as well, so he tried very hard, but unsuccessfully, to make an answer, though he did not yet know what the man was saying. Even had he been able to make his lips move, the man would not have understood him, because Arthur’s face was pulled down into his stomach, so that for all the world he looked like a fully-dressed and giant foetus curled up at the bottom of the stairs on a plush-red carpet, hiding in the shadow of two aspidistras that curved out over him like arms of jungle foliage.

      The man’s pokes became more persistent, and Arthur dimly realized that the fingers must belong either to one of the waiters or to the publican himself. It was a waiter, towel in one hand and tray in the other, white jacket open from overwork, a face normally blank but now expressing some character because he had begun to worry about this tall, iron-faced, crop-haired youth lying senseless at his feet.

      ‘He’s had a drop too much, poor bloke,’ said an elderly man, stepping over Arthur’s body and humming a hymn tune as he went up the stairs, thinking how jolly yet sinful it would be if he possessed the weakness yet strength of character to get so drunk and roll down the stairs in such a knocked-out state.

      ‘Come on, Jack,’ the waiter pleaded with Arthur. ‘We don’t want the pleece to come in and find you like that or we shall get summonsed. We had trubble wi’ a man last week who had a fit and had to be taken to ’t General Hospital in an amb’lance. We don’t want any more trubble, or the pub’ll get a bad name.’

      As Arthur rolled over to consolidate and deepen his sleep a glaring overhead light caught his eyes and he opened them, to see the waiter’s white coat and pink face.

      ‘Christ!’ he mumbled.

      ‘He won’t help you,’ the waiter said dispassionately. ‘Come on, get up and go out for some fresh air, then you’ll feel better.’

      Arthur felt happy yet uncooperative when the waiter tried to get him to his feet: like being in hospital and having a nurse do everything for you with great exertion, and all the time warning that you mustn’t try to help yourself in any way or else it would result in you being kept in bed for another week. Like after he had been knocked down by a lorry riding to Derby two years ago. But the waiter had a different point of view, and after pulling him into a sitting position cried, his heavy breath whistling against the aspidistra leaves:

      ‘All right. That’s enough. You aren’t lifeless. Come on, get up yoursen