Page 110 of While I’m Still Here

Danny shrugs. “Why don't you?”

Bea makes a strangled noise against my shoulder. A second later she's laughing, properly laughing, tears still wet on her cheeks as she pulls back far enough to look at him. “Of course you have fucking lighter fluid.”

“I like to be prepared.”

“For what?” Colin asks. “Sudden arson?”

“You're going to feel really stupid when there's an arson emergency, and I'm the only one equipped.”

“I don't think that's how emergencies work.”

“Sounds like something a man without lighter fluid would say.”

Bea laughs harder, wiping beneath her eyes as she finally releases me, and I find myself smiling as Colin mutters something about checking whether any of this is legal, and Danny immediately declares that legality is “a deeply negative attitude to bring to a bra burning.” And somehow, less than ten minutes after arriving with a garden incinerator and accidentally quoting Notting Hill on Bea's doorstep, the four of us are carrying armfuls of bras into her back garden.

Apparently we're doing this.

There are forty-three bras.

Colin counts them while Bea carries them outside in armfuls and Danny opens a bottle of wine as though we're hosting a garden party rather than conducting a ceremonial destruction of several thousand pounds' worth of lingerie. By the time the last bundle lands beside the incinerator, there are bras everywhere. Black lace, red satin, white cotton, things involving enough straps that I can't determine how a person gets into them without written instructions.

“Three thousand pounds,” Bea says mournfully.

Colin, crouched beside the pile, looks up. “What?”

“Approximately.”

“You've spent three grand on bras?”

“I have tits.”

“For six more days,” Danny says.

The garden goes silent. Danny freezes with the wine bottle halfway to his glass. “Too soon?”

Bea stares at him, then she starts laughing. “Absolutely.”

He exhales. “Thank fuck.”

Colin throws a cushion at him.

I am beginning to understand their respective roles. Colin watches Bea constantly without appearing to, noticing every change in her expression before anybody else does. Danny seems to possess an internal alarm that goes off whenever the room becomes too quiet, at which point he says something inappropriate until she laughs.

And apparently I arrive with garden incinerators.

There are worse things to be.

The first few bras go easily. Bea holds up a black lace one and informs us it cost seventy pounds, which makes Danny tell her to burn it immediately on financial principle. A red one apparently survived a disastrous first date with someone named Nathan, prompting Colin to demand that one be burned twice. Danny recognises another from a Christmas party, then spends several uncomfortable seconds attempting to explain that his memory of it was entirely professional while Colin stares at him.

After that, they become less ceremonial. A strapless bra Bea describes as an engineering hate crime. A sports bra from a six-week period when she apparently intended to become a woman who enjoyed running. A white lace one worn beneath a bridesmaid dress. An enormous beige contraption she insists could have sheltered a family of four.

Some have stories.

Most don't.

That's what gets me.

They're ordinary things from an ordinary life. Bras she bought without ever imagining a day when she wouldn't need them anymore. She complained about the straps and underwire. Threw them into laundry baskets. Wore them to work, dates, and Christmas parties. Probably spent mornings digging through drawers looking for the one that wouldn't show beneath a particular dress.