Time is not linear, not flat, not uni-directional, but has stairs that go up and down.
A carpet up the stairs. Sarah said she’d always had the ambition to have a carpet up the stairs, instead of those battered floorboards; still bearing the marks of the soldiers who were billeted here during the war. A carpet up the stairs, neatly tucked in and fixed by stair-rods; once lodged securely in place to be proof against the clumsiest footsteps tramping up to bed or down to the workaday routine – such carpet then hoovered daily at first so as to suck up the loose fluff that all new carpets tended to shed. Sarah had been keen for the best possible pile.
“The denser the tufts, dear Sarah, the more the bugs will eventually congregate between them, at the roots of the hooked and carded weave,” he said one day, in mock of the chap on TV who spoke that way to his guests. In fact, the mockery was pretence because, in truth, he actually <I>was</I> that chap from daytime TV, now masquerading as an ordinary man, one who pretended to act like celebrities whilst all the time he actually was a celebrity, a celebrity talking about stair carpet to his wife Sarah, a wife who couldn’t really believe he was a TV celebrity at all, when, self-evidently, he hadn’t yet been able to afford the money to spend on new stair carpet in the first place. Who’d ever heard of a TV celebrity who’d live with bare and battered floorboards instead of cushioning them with the homely insulation of woven and worried wool. Teazled threads and teased out torments of tufted terror. Tourniquets of trench warfare.
He shook his head. No point in throwing her off the scent with such brainstorming. Sick stayed with carpets forever, he claimed! Whilst floorboards could be cleaned quite easily with a mop. Sick didn’t sink readily into the grain and knot of wood, especially varnished or polished wood – whilst carpets received vomit with open arms, retaining the shame of a drunken homecoming … yes, as good as forever. This had been his argument. Not money. But wear. And reminders. And permanent stains no remover could possibly budge.
Sarah looked askance – as if he was one such stain that no amount of persuasion could budge. He was famous for this on TV. A chat show host who could control a hundred simultaneous arguments between competitive punters with one hand tied behind his back like a spare tongue. Nothing moved him. He was the archetypal hard-hearted host. He blinded folk with words. The audience knew not where he was going with the tangled audit trail of his speech patterns. A bit like knitting on looms of lateral levity, disguised as pitilessness. He was TV’s Mister Wipe-your-feet-before-you-come-in. He was the Ax in Axminster. His vocal cords were a spiral staircase of fibres in the throat. He was tungsten.
But it was all a tease. Just as he was teasing Sarah now about the carpet. Just as I am teasing you about his TV appearances and the wings he wielded like second and third tongues. Sarah, in fact, should be fast asleep, or at least sluggishly bending her way towards slumber, number and number in bone and body, nearer and nearer to God as each tearful year passed within tiers of alternate worlds.
During the blitz, a version of him crept up the still uncarpeted stairs, as quietly as he could. But the bombs suddenly ceased. He swore as his hastily unshod feet failed to deaden the clip clop of the woodchucks that chirruped at every step. Sarah appeared round the corner of the landing, thwackable rolling-pin aloft, woken from her ugly sleep by the soft shoo shuffle of his drunken soles upon bare woven tree fibres. His shambling was sharp enough even for the dull hearing of what he saw as his fat shrew called Sarah. He abruptly spewed up his night’s alcoholic doings via the sooty corkscrews within the guttural chimneys of his metabolism. He held up his soldier’s shoes as if offering them up to her for sacrifice.
At least cleaning up the sick come the morning would be just a top-and-tailing of the cantilevered pier-boardwalk of their house’s bare stairwell with a dishcloth, rather than (if they’d had that carpet laid) with the deep-pile suction of enormous sucking funnels that only God could ever wield, even in the post-war era. But they say Heaven itself has eschewed stair-carpet… Thwack! She still wanted the best possible pile, it seemed.
The old TV screen abruptly diminished to a white dot. Such TVs weren’t even widespread till after the war, i.e. in the fifties. It was during that war when he was effectively demobbed and disinvented, with not even a stain on his character, that Sarah sat in widow’s weeds: perhaps still debating, even today, on having a stair-carpet laid so as to deaden the noisily shod memories of air-raid and sexual defenestration carried by the surface of the bare-tiered floorboards in the form of dents. She would air-brush him, name, recurrent stair-rods and all. Or at least disguise such imprints in time.
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