She really would like 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 the sexual bed or down to the workaday routine – such carpet then hoovered: done daily at first so as to suck up the loose fluffs that all new carpets tended to grow.

Sarah was keen for the best possible pile.

"But the denser the tufts, dear Sarah, the more the bugs will eventually congregate between them," I 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, I actually was that chap from daytime TV, now masquerading as an ordinary bloke, 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 I was a TV celebrity at all, because, self-evidently, I 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.

I shook my head. No point in throwing her off the scent with such brainstorming words.

Sick stayed with carpets forever, I claimed! 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 sick with open arms, retaining the messy shame of drunken homecomings … forever!

This had been my argument. Not money. But wear. And reminders of sick. And permanent stains no remover could possibly budge.

Sarah looked askance – as if I was one such sick stain no amount of persuasion could budge. I 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 me. I was the archetypal hard-hearted host. I blinded folk with words. They knew not where I was going with the tangled audit trail of my speech patterns. A bit like knitting on looms of lateral levity, disguised as pitilessness. I was TV's Mister Wipe-your-feet-before-you-come-in. I was the Ax in Axminster. My vocal cords were a spiral staircase of fibres in the throat. I was tungsten.

But it was all a tease. Just as I was teasing Sarah now about the carpet. Just as I am teasing you about the TV appearances and the wing I wielded like a second tongue. Sarah, in fact, should be fast asleep, or at least sluggishly bending her way towards numb slumber, nearer to God as each tearful year passed.

During the London Blitz, I crept up the still uncarpeted stairs, as quietly as I could. But the bombs suddenly ceased. I swore as my hastily unshod feet failed to deaden the clip clop of the wood chucks 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 my drunken soles upon bare woven tree fibres.

My shambling was sharp enough even for the dull hearing of my fat shrew Sarah. I abruptly sicked up my night's alcoholic doings via the sooty corkscrews within the guttural chimneys of my metabolism. I held up my soldier's shoes as if offering them up for sacrifice.

At least cleaning up the sick come morning would be just a top and tailing of the cantilevered pier boardwalk of our house's central stairwell with a dishcloth, rather than (if we'd had that carpet laid) the deep-pile suction of the enormous hoover-funnels that only God could ever wield, even in wartime.

But they say even Heaven has eschewed stair carpet…

Thwack! My head rang. She still wanted the best possible pile, it seemed.

TVs weren't even widespread till after the war, i.e. in the nineteen fifties. It was during that war when I was effectively disinvented, with not even a sick stain on my character. Sarah's in widow weeds forever now: perhaps still debating, even today in 2008, on having a stair carpet to blot out the memories carried by real sick travelling as memory’s lubrication through the hose-filters of an old lady like her.

The wordscreen, with me on it, abruptly diminishes to a white dot like old TV screens always did.

(unpublished)