It was not far from the coast, the place he was being shown. The sea roared, invisible, hidden by dips and elevations in the surrounding landscape. It was disconcerting; the house sounded like it was forever engulfed in a low-level storm.
‘When was it built?’ asked Paul.
‘Oh, at the best possible time,’ said the agent. ‘You know, in the days of quality workmanship and materials et cetera.’
‘What year though?’
‘Can you hear that?’ she said. ‘The sound of the sea. Just wonderful.’
The last person to live there had disappeared. There had been a story in the newspaper. She had been beautiful and alone and her name was Alice. Paul would see her in the shops and try to catch her eye. He held up garish packets of cereal and pretended to read them, using his peripheral vision to look at her. She noticed the performative way he handled brightly coloured foods and studiously avoided his gaze.
Paul had never spoken to Alice and regretted it. He was maybe twenty years her senior and not in the sort of physical shape that renders such differences meaningless. At any rate, she seemed uninterested in other people.
He had followed her home once and watched her lean her head against the front door and stand there like that, in the rain, for minutes. As if steeling herself.
She went inside and he watched through her windows as she wept, and stared for hours into spaces that subsequent visits would reveal were devoid of televisions.
He used binoculars.
Paul put his hand on the bannister and imagined her hand having touched it. He scanned rooms for clues of her existence, finding none.
She had been erased.
The agent had made a concerted effort to remove all personal effects and unusual interior design choices, like the one room that contained no furniture whatsoever and had been painted entirely black, but was now covered in dozens of layers of white paint and actually felt quite airy. Or the hundreds of photos of a particular child at different ages but never any older than seven; photos found throughout every single room of the house except for the one room that had been unnervingly empty and black.
Paul’s house, unlike Alice, was disappearing gradually. Year after year, a little more of the land beneath it fell into the ocean. The sinews of metal and wood that anchored his home to the clifftop were slowly becoming exposed, and before long the ravages of erosion would have reclaimed enough of his freehold that four spacious bedrooms, two gleaming bathrooms and an insouciant kitchen/conservatory would tumble from their perch and smash into a million pieces against the waves.
Paul looked for the painting on her living room wall.
He had watched her paint it.
For months, night after night, Alice and her easel, stood in front of a huge mirror she had leant up against the mantlepiece in the living room. She used plastic bags for paint brushes, scrunched up in her discoloured hands. He saw her features emerge gradually from the deep, swirling blues and greens she smeared violently onto the canvas.
A self-portrait.
Alice appeared in the oils like a ghost, silently howling, eyes vivid with pain. She was framed - both in the painting, and in Paul’s binoculars - by the thick, green velvet curtains around her window.
Occasionally she stopped painting to go to the toilet, and sometimes left the bathroom door open in the hallway outside the living room.
If he moved through the undergrowth to a vantage point at another window, the mirror let him see into her bathroom.
‘Are you alright?’ said the agent.
‘Sorry?’ Paul was looking into the hallway, frowning.
He turned back towards the living room, overwhelmed by seeing it all from the inside.
He saw the silver takeaway food containers strewn haphazardly, and where the last drop of every colour of paint had been squeezed out of their tubes onto repurposed tea trays and then discarded on the floor. An armchair piled high with spattered clothes that would never be washed.
The easel at the centre of it all, a monument to her enterprise.
He was watching when, at the end, Alice swept through the detritus and hung her finished painting defiantly over the fireplace, making very sure it was straight amid the chaos.
She stared into her own features that had been warped and distended by the portrait; into her inhumanly elongated and screaming mouth. She stared for a long time, but it didn’t stare back at her. It wasn’t one of those where the eyes follow you wherever you are in the room.
It was looking out of the window. Looking at him.
He remembered adjusting his binoculars to bring the periphery into the focus, the swirling greens and blue that threatened to swallow her.
There, in the margins, orbiting her head like a fly.
It was him, staring out of the painting too.
Now, the painting was gone.
He looked around the living room. Pristine. Anodyne.
There was a blown-up photo of an orchid on the wall, calculatedly unobtrusive.
The disarray had been arrayed.
He stopped coming to watch her after the painting. He looked out of his own window instead.
The sea bellowed and the salt air slapped his face with invigorating fury.
The sun was brilliant in its final moments one evening; a luminous orange sinking into the ocean, setting the surface alight with a galaxy of dancing stars. And somewhere among them there might have been a blackness. Paul wasn’t sure. Something silhouetted against the stars, that couldn’t reflect light but absorbed it. It came and went – a full stop bobbing in the water – and then vanished.
It occurred to Paul that it might have been a person.
He did nothing.
“What if she comes back?” asked Paul, hopefully.
“Who?” said the agent.