By

Craig Ennew

—

Eleven: A Cackle of Hyenas

This week : Craig is enters the dodgy realms of Facebook Marketplace

Jumping into Facebook Marketplace is like finding yourself at a silent disco hosted by Primark. My previous shopping trips to “Dodgy FM” have been non-essential and suitably cautious. As time contracts towards the move to The Shack in West Lulworth though, a sense of panic takes over our off-loading of goods, and I throw myself into it with gay abandon.

This newly-discovered vigour brings some success. There is a moment of fortuity as I discover that one of my messages is from the prospective buyer of our house in Salisbury. She’d like to purchase – and therefore keep in situ – some of our more cumbersome items of furniture. Two birds; one stone. Via Marketplace, we also shift our unwieldy super-king-size bed. Rather foolishly, whilst chatting with the collecting buyer, I reveal that we are planning to move imminently. His immediate response is, ‘So will the house be empty at some point?’ This is not something you want to hear from a stranger who’s standing in one of your bedrooms, albeit one with his clothes on (see Seven: The Naked Man Story).

Happier days: the Christmas dining table

Being on Facebook Marketplace is game of two halves: you’re either screaming into the back of an empty cave, hearing the lonely echo of your voice as you lower the asking price until you’re virtually giving the item away; or you’re surrounded by baying hyenas taking sizeable chunks of your flesh. Then there are the consumers who initially engage (‘is this item still for sale?’ or the just plain lazy, ‘SFS?’) only to disappear into the virtual ether. The hyenas are impossible to shake off. What brand is your mattress? Can you assure me that’s it’s in an immaculate condition? If you stand it on its edge, does it fall over? How many people have slept on it? How many of them were incontinent? Questions – pointless, fatuous, unnecessarily detailed questions – keep pouring in. So I delete these tenacious carnivores, leaving me with a list of either strange or made-up names, each accompanied by ‘beware scammers’ messages that crop up with disarming regularity. I delete these too until left with only white, middle-classed names. This is just plain wrong: ‘Ooh – there’s a “Jeremy” interested in the chaise longue, darling: they must be legit.’

The whole process, though, has cemented my belief that houses have souls. I’ll tell you for why. When we first viewed our present Salisbury house, each room had a lock on the door and was occupied by a middle-aged male lodger. Nicotine stained every inch of carpet and wall, and one of the inhabitants was using the ensuite shower as a mini-bar. There was a painting of a naked lady with horns in one of the bedrooms. It was more boarding house than family home. But bit by bit, we made that place our own; a home that gave us thirteen wonderful years of madness. In short: we filled it with more than material things.

a netherworld of half packed boxes and stacked chairs

Oddly though, watching those solid objects vanish feels like watching the soul being sucked out of a body. Up at the top bedroom, the fore-mentioned super-king-sized bed often carried The Boy and his two beloved grown-up sisters (and sometimes their mates too) as they watched movies together on their laptops. It was a big old ship of shrieks and laughter in a sea of empty Pringles tubes; it was a billowy nest for big and not-so-big siblings to curl up in and dream big. Down at the bottom of the house, come Christmas, the grand old dining table would host gatherings of our extended family as we enjoyed raucous games of cribbage or Sevens. In the centre, there was my old man with his patter for the game and his pseudo-fierce competition, candles lit, red wine flowing freely, pipe dangling from his mouth. He left us too soon and now the table’s gone too. The room grieves for them both. It is without atmosphere: an echoey netherworld of half packed boxes and stacked chairs.

Spaces gape where once there was comfortable furniture; silence reigns where once there was happy noise. We’re ready to go now, and you almost sense that this house is ready to wave us off too. Somewhere in a drawer, we have its old deeds from the 1870s: plans for the land and notice of the very first sale after it had been built – all for the princely sum of £400. It was number one in the road then; now almost a century and a half on, it’s limping in at number twenty-two. We’ll pass the deeds to the new custodian.

Marketplace consumers: ‘baying hyenas’

I’d like to feel this is the way it is for The Shack in West Lulworth too. As I’d hoped, we’ve managed to visit the place again recently, and the current owners have taken most of their belongings with them. We’ve been told that we will have to wait until the new year before Will the Builder and his team starts knocking through walls, fitting windows, making the place fit for purpose. But this sits well with me. We’ve had some good news: the current fireplace is in working order. Give me a fire to build; let me watch it spit and crackle as the Winter tips into its deepest darkest sleep, and I’m a happy man.

We’ll move into The Shack. We’ll deep-clean, we’ll paint all the walls white for the time being, we’ll fill the rooms with our furniture and scatter our pictures and paintings over its walls. Then we’ll light the fire. We’ll give the place a soul.

A gift from us to The Shack until it’s ready to be born again in the new year.

©Craig Ennew 2024

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