Painted Love Letters by Catherine Bateson

rested over our house the way I had seen clouds sit on top of mountains, and some days we seemed to move slowly through it, as though the cloud had turned into leaden fog and each movement we made required just a little more effort than we could bear to make. Only Nan seemed to step through these times lightly. Maybe it was the yoga, I thought, strengthening her legs or maybe it was because she had done all that sleeping those years ago when Mum was a shouting teenager.
    One night Nan came home with Badger and they both looked smiley and secret. He whispered to her, in the hallway outside our room, ‘Do you want me to stick around?’
    â€˜No, better not,’ she said, ‘it wouldn’t be right, you getting caught up in any flak.’
    When he’d gone. Nan announced that she was moving out of our house and into Badger’s.
    â€˜I don’t believe you’re doing this,’ Mum said, ‘I don’t believe a woman of your age would do such a stupid thing.’
    â€˜You can’t move,’ I said, ‘Nan, you can’t move.’
    â€˜I hate going, Dave,’ she said to my father, ‘I know it just seems like the wrong time but I don’t think it is. I think you and Rhetta need to be together and I know Badger and I do. I won’t be far away. It’s just that I won’t be living here full-time.’
    â€˜Why do you have to go?’ Mum demanded. ‘Just why? Tell me one good reason, and I don’t mean that nonsense about Dave and me needing time. We need you. Chrissie needs you. We need you here.’
    Mum slammed into her bedroom. We could hear her banging things on her dressing table. Then she came out waving her hairbrush around.
    â€˜What right have you got to be happy,’ she shouted. ‘What right have you got to be making plans!’
    And she threw her hairbrush down. It bounced and landed at Nan’s feet.
    â€˜You know I would give you anything,’ Nan said, ‘anything at all. If I could I’d take my own lungs out, but I can’t, I can’t.’ She walked up to my mother and then she took off the long string of amber she always wore and put it around my mother’s neck. I don’t think Mum even noticed because she was crying too hard and her hands were over her eyes.
    We did see Nan all the time. She dropped in nearly every day and we went over to her place too, and it was almost as if she hadn’t left except Mum wore the amber necklace all the time and seemed to soften a little as though it wasn’t only the hairbrush that had cracked that afternoon but also a casing she’d made around herself. Although she still worked at the bistro, because she said it kept her sane, she stopped working back-to-back shifts and weekends and was at home more often. Sometimes when I got home from school she’d be lying with Dad on the couch, not talking or watching television, just lying close and for a minute or two I’d forget everything and just be happy to see them like that.
    Nan bought Mum a new hairbrush, made of boar’s bristle with a wooden handle. It was the kind of hairbrush, Nan said, that would last you a lifetime, if you didn’t lose it somewhere. They were made in England and you could only buy them at David Jones. Mum had her hair cut because of the grease smell and the washing but she used Nan’s brush every night, first on me counting one hundred strokes and then on herself, when she’d take the amber necklace off and hang it around my neck so the brush wouldn’t get caught in it and pull it and maybe break it. I’d stand there counting the honey-coloured beads as my mother counted brushstrokes. I knew the amber was special because my grandfather, not Badger, had given Nan the necklace when they got engaged. He’d brought it back from the War. Amber was for eternity, Nan said, but she also pointed out the little lives that had been trapped in it, insect parts