‘Real dead people,’ insisted Ollie. Jess found the remains of a packet of dry old Rowntree’s fruit gums in the bottom of her bag. Ollie chose black, Anna orange. They sucked, exhausted, silenced, as the bus made its way past Nelson and the lions and round Trafalgar Square. Yes, we all thought Ollie was a handful. It was brave of Jess to undertake him. But he was a bright boy, and Anna liked him. He was Anna’s friend. Jess needed Anna to have a friend, even a bad friend. And Jess owed Ollie’s mother a favour or two. The groves of statuary, the petrified trees, the stony branching despairing and gesticulating dead. The helmet-maker’s once beautiful wife. Roubiliac’s famously macabre figure of Death in Westminster Abbey, the one that so captivated the naughty and precocious Ollie, portrays Death threatening Lady Elizabeth Nightingale with a thunderbolt. She died of a miscarriage. The mother died, but the child survived. Queen Philippa, the mother of the Black Prince, also lies in Westminster Abbey, and her effigy does not flatter her.
