"You pull, I'll push! This way a bit."

"Geez, this is heavy. How the hell are we going to get this down the stairs?"

"OK, plan B. Get it far enough away from the wall, and we'll take it apart here."

"Bloody wardrobe! It didn't seem that heavy when we got it up here."

"We were younger then, and fitter."

As we struggled with the big heavy brute, I swore that I would never again buy a double wardrobe, and felt enormously glad we were getting rid of this particular one.

For one thing, it was too big to fit into my new house, and for another, it had been dismantled and mantled up again so many times that it now no longer fit together with much precision. Its two separate halves leaned apart as if they had grown weary of togetherness over the long years. Hairgrips and other stuff regularly fell through the gaps, and spiders had long taken refuge behind its massive bulk, and it was time to say goodbye and good riddance.

Before it left the flat however, it had to be searched for a silver necklace that had been seen to slide down behind the drawers, just too late to make a grab for it. That had happened a couple of years ago, and as the necklace had been a gift, I was eager to be reunited with it. Two hours later, sweaty and dusty, my son Vince and I looked at each other, puzzled.

"Are you sure it fell down there?" he asked.
"I watched it," I said, "But I wasn't quick enough to catch it."

"Well, it's not there now," he replied.

"I know!" was my acerbic response.

"It's gone to the same place as the stash."

That comment triggered our giggle response, and before we knew it we were helpless with laughter as the memories came flooding back.

Some months before, Vince had turned up at the flat with a plastic bag filled with some dried greenery that needed to be shredded before it could be smoked. Being aware that it could land me in strife if discovered, I reluctantly agreed to hang onto it for him, reasoning that nobody would suspect a respectable lady in her fifties to be in possession of illicit drugs.

Taking the bag, I looked for a place to hide it, and eventually settled on the wardrobe, placed it just out of sight, and promptly forgot about it.

A few weeks later, Vince turned up to take back his stash, and I went to the wardrobe to find... bugger all! Vince helped me to search the wardrobe. Still bugger all. That weekend Vince and Leanne turned up to search the entire flat. Yet again, bugger all. It never again made an appearance.

The whole incident left some questions in its wake. Was there a black hole in my wardrobe? Had somebody trained the spiders to drag my silver necklace away? Did they scoff the weed? How do you know when a spider's stoned? Does it wave a couple of legs in the air in the peace sign, mumbling "Hey man" in arachnospeak? Or was the bloody wardrobe haunted? Five years on I'm no wiser, but I haven't lost a silver necklace since, let alone somebody's illegal stash!

© Sandy Parkinson November, 2003 Word count 633