This beach hasn’t changed – it’s the same slim strip of coarse-grained, pinkish sand in a black rock cove as curved as an eye. There’s something about the sound of the waves, the crumbling clay cliffs. Voices carry on the wind, a blur of words from the coast path above. Ponies graze the cliff meadows amongst the bracken and bee orchids. 

I wouldn’t say that I come here to think – quite the opposite. Here, things are simpler. Here, perhaps, I could slip off this false carapace and canter off, crabwise, to the waves. Here, like the sand, I take only what I am given. On the tideline, the familiar tell, a colour tender as baby flesh. On my knees I sift and scoop, picking out tiny cowries, their curving shells the pale pink of a summer dawn as the hot hand of the sun presses down on my back.

Further up the beach, I’ve left the pile of bags I carried here. Red rifts stripe my palms from carrying their awkward weight over rocks and sand. It’s all in the bags, what I owe you, what I stole from you and have hidden for so long. I’m no better than my aunt, twisting the rings from her dead mother’s fingers, hiding them away from her siblings, those bands of dark old gold set with a galaxy of rubies, sapphires and diamonds. Rings which I coveted. Rings that also were taken from me. 

I turn from my sifting and lean back on the bags. It’s uncomfortable, resting on a nest of jutting points which dig into my skin. Out in the bay, a seal breaks the surface and sea water pours silkily from its face. Grebes and divers dip beneath the waves and reemerge some distance away. The sea’s surface is oily in the heat, viscous as it pours over the black tips of reef-like rocks. The haunted summer wind brushes the exposed rocks of the littoral. Closed sea anemones cluster on the rocks, wet and red.

If anyone can do it, you will find me here. This beach is the place I’ve chosen for a reckoning with you. Even now you may have begun picking your way over the rocks from Carne. You probably think I’ll give them back to you, but these you won’t have. No one will – that’s why I’m here.

Until a week ago, I hadn’t been inside my father’s house for fifteen years. I knew that he was dying. I clean the doctor’s surgery; it’s one of many places I work. I’m a shadow, slipping in and out of view before the day arrives. I read his file, saw the many illnesses held in his body like cards pulled from a stacked deck, a royal flush, and so I started watching his house again, early and late. 

I live in a wind-soaked former holiday chalet on the cliffs. When the trees are bare, I can glimpse the glittering turrets of my father’s creekside home in the valley, watch his lights going on and off in the day-time and by night. As the end approached they flickered rapidly, a lighthouse flash of danger and distress. I felt as brimful as a cream-coloured sky before a snowfall. Finally, I smelt the possibility of victory – as if, for all these years, all that had been needed was the right combination of atmospheric pressure, a cold easterly meeting a warm storm wind from the west.

In this world, there’s so much muck and dirt to be dislodged. Every day I clean and sweep and the next day there it is again, an endless rain of dirt and dead skin cells. I drive to the accompanying rattle of buckets and mops in the back of my chewed-up Nissan Micra, my Henry hoover riding shotgun in the passenger seat, and a basket of disinfectant, cloths and window cleaner in the footwell. 

That morning, I parked a little way up the road and took the old path through the woods. Along the silted creekside, I walked beneath a richness of August blackberries and dark-leaved elder. During my visits, I’d worn a groove on the black earth, a furrow made by an animal trying to return to its fold. Clouds mustered above me, all dreamy shades of bruise and smoke. I sniffed the wind, warm and rain-laden, and felt it lift my hair. The lights in my father’s house. Off and on. Off and then, as the clouds darkened, a river of light flowed from the top floor to the front door. An ambulance rumbled up over potholes and parked under the portico, yellow and waddly as a bath duck, splashed by the mud of the lane. Puddy opened the door to let in two muscly, green uniformed paramedics, my grandmother’s rings aglitter on her fingers. 

A gurney. A bluebell-coloured vinyl medical glove dropped on the dim gravel of the drive. A blanket, cherry red, over the prone figure of my father. An oxygen tank. His blanched face, beneath the straps of the mask. Off they went. Puddy stood for a moment, stunned but jerking slightly, as if tazered. She went back inside. Keys, bag, coat. Minutes later, her nifty silver Mercedes A type departed, and it began to rain.

I was up for breaking a window. I was up for anything, but the door opened to my touch and I stepped onto the familiar floor of brick-red and lava-grey encaustic tiles. Puddy’s dogs, a mother and daughter pair of black Labradors, roused themselves. We knew each other well, having had many encounters in the woods. I pulled their favourite treats from my smock pockets and let them lick my hands. 

On the wall above the limestone mantel carved with a running wave was the painting I had come for, an impasto field of off-whites and blurry creams, its sister piece sold to the Tate for over a million last year. Despite its heavy look, it was light in my arms after I untethered it from the wall.  

While searching for large bin bags in which to stash my loot, I found the little room under the stairs next to the same old wretched loo Puddy had done little to improve. In what used to be the butler’s pantry was a recently vacated single bed and a bedside table covered by a thicket of pill bottles. This was where the old beast had ended up, then, in a damp, dark hole, with bars on its ivy-covered window. 

Oh, but on the dismal walls such treasure hung. Small, square paintings not much wider than a large man’s hand span which glittered like icons in smoky Byzantine churches. Each contained an image you could tumble into headfirst. My favourite showed bands of colour – beaten silver, taupe, aubergine – laid inside each other, becoming smaller and smaller until they disappeared to a vanishing point, a shimmering hallway down which a soul could pass before melting into the lamp black silence at its centre. 

I saw at once what they were: his songs of praise, his secret chords. His mitigation lest he face divine judgement for his faithlessness. The terror of death, of all he wrongs he’d committed, was written in these blazing squares. I took all of them. Every single one. If he ever returns to this place, he’ll find his sanctum sanctorum empty. A drawing board, a desk, a plans chest, a creaking floorboard beneath damp Axminster. By his sketchpad, a stick of charcoal. I picked it up and wrote God hates you on the wall.

Doctor Seth knows of our connection, and she’s always been kind to me. When Mum died, she got me counselling and helped me sort myself out. Sick note after sick note for a while, but the doctor never got fed up with me. She understood when I told her I was going away. ‘But you’ll come back,’ she said. ‘This is your home, too.’ 

When she gave me the job, she said nothing more than the usual about confidentiality. She’s the only one who ever speaks to me about my mother, who even seems to remember her. Doctor Seth smells nice, like vanilla and sea salt mixed together and warmed up slightly. Towards the end, my mother had a kind of chemical tang about her, a smell which disappeared briefly each time they pulled her from the sea.

Lots of people go crazy, but they lose their minds in different ways. My mother peeled potatoes until peelings were all that remained. She left doors and windows open in all weathers, asked if I could hear the buzzing from the underground cables carrying messages beneath the waves to America. The radar discs were tracking her, scanning secrets from the grey, damp forests of her brain. She went shopping and came back days later. Wet. Every time, wet through, and it hadn’t always been raining. And the reason for it never occurred to me, quite honestly. I was thirteen. And thirteen-year-olds notice everything, but they can’t always fit the pieces together. No-one said, Your mother is ill. In and out of the water. In and out of hospital. Always released to try again, relentless as the waves.

When my mother died, my father and Puddy wouldn’t take me in, because Puddy had given birth to you by then. I went from place to place.  When the system released me, I moved to this chalet. Last winter, something shook loose, and I opened the old boxes containing my mother’s papers. Child support payments never made. Rent arrears, last notice electricity and gas bills. All those years of struggle, and my father never gave us a penny. He employed every deceit imaginable, an arrow shower of lies from my family of thieves.

What a shame there’s no money in art. The house with the turrets, glittering in the valley, was in Puddy’s name. The rest – millions, probably – is untouchable, hidden away in some trust. Gleaming gold and gems on the soft skin of Puddy’s fingers. Waiting, watching. Puddy and my father. Ink-black darkness pouring through me each time I saw them hand in hand in the village or on the moss path to St Wyllow.

When my mother was a girl, the locals dumped their rubbish on this beach. The tide came up and carried it away. Traces remain at low water and after winter storms – odd, rusted coils of bedsprings, bucket-shaped lumps of concrete. Amongst it, tiny basslings hide in purple shadows.

I started collecting driftwood in spring. There’s quite a pile, now. Logs, timber, broken pallets. Brushwood from the cliffs. The sea’s refuse. All summer I’ve been planning today’s great blaze. You’ll see the light, the smoke, despite the glare of the setting sun.  

The big painting of the white field from above my father’s fireplace is the first to go. On this beach where, for the last time, my mother walked into the water, I place it on the pyre. The others follow, khaki and zinc, slashes of lamp black, crimson screams.

It’s the final piece that troubles me, the first painting I saw in the little room under the stairs of a beautiful hallway leading to an inner blackness. At the centre of the marble-clad temples in Greece and Rome there was always a room for the god to inhabit, a circular space full of darkness, entirely enclosed. No windows. No doors. The most sacred place in the building was lightless and empty, a sealed centre containing nothing. 

Cooler air moves over the sea, raising a light fog which dims the sun’s intensity. For a second, the air turns the peculiar, grainy black of eclipse light, and in this strange moment the painting opens its arms to me. It tells me my father was sorry. From its surface rises some bitter scent I recognise, preservative as salt, metallic as the lead-lined coffins of the contaminated dead.

No mercy. I hurl it on top of the pyre and grab the container of petrol the farmer has chained to the rock next to his boat and lobster pots. The currents in this bay are known for dragging the litter away, casting them off into the depths, never to be seen again. My mother remembered eventually. A fitting place for local trash. 

Over the sea, a violet sky. A half-moon ghosts the upper cliff. Amongst the dark blocks of container ships, a blaze of lemon horizon. Time for me to light my beacon. Last sun on the white sands of Carne, the hotel guests in their robes dissolving into silver mirages. A beach of small, safe waves. You white-blond and brown-shouldered; the gulls and the campion nodding. The verdancy of gorse, remedy for the broken-hearted. 

It’s falling back to earth now, water vapour that’s spent all day rising up into the blue. The matches are damp but the third one lights and tosses its bright head of flame high. I edge back. Such intensity already, huge, hurting sparks and cracks of splintering wood driving me seaward until my feet touch water. A huge bang as debris blasts everywhere and I turn and dive.

Slack tide. I made sure of that. I’m not ready for the currents to take me yet. I deserve one triumph in this pitiless life. I stole what I could never benefit by, had only power to destroy. Whose fault is that? It’s only paint and canvas after all. His legacy. Your inheritance. And mine. 

Perhaps you’ll come in time to douse the flames; you have that kind of golden air about you. Perhaps you’ll save the day somehow, the young knight errant that you are. Perhaps the flames themselves will refuse the dirty work I’ve given them to do, and, of their own accord, subside and die. I don’t care. I’ve made my point. Time to disappear. 

You were the only one who saw me. When you walked with them in the woods, tiny and unsure, my father on one side of you, Puddy on the other. One, two, three, weeeee! Up you swung. You were the one who paused, looked back, sensed the watcher in the shadows, and said nothing at all while they cooed like pigeons above your bright head. You peered out of your bedroom window on lilac-skied summer evenings, pulling back the curtain when you should have been asleep, opening the window wide. Your eyes searched the field at the edge of the woods, the drystone wall, the shivering branches of beech. You sensed me in the supermarket, the shapeless worker moving quickly out of your path, the shadowy figure wiping clean a pane of smudged glass. 

Friendship was your offer. The kindness I had never been shown. Restitution for the unfairness I’d suffered at the hands of your mother, our father. You wanted to see me, to get to know me, to try to make amends. This is my answer to you. I am not worth it. I stole from you to steal from them. I burned what I could never own, works of art which could only ever belong to you no matter what you said.

Neck deep. The current shifts again, a landward push. The tide’s rough hand, surging up the sand, into the coming dark. And I see you, torch in hand. You’ve always known what we both needed. You’ve waited for me as I’ve waited for you. I mistake the sharp prod to my chest for the thumping of my misshapen heart until I see my spirit painting– the glittering hallway and infinite centre – floating on the water. With a pulse the tide presses it to me as your hand wraps itself in mine.