Beano and the Lost Markers

They were on the beach at sunset, the whole family and a few neighbours, cards laid out on a blanket, when Ama opened the drawstring bag and found it empty.

“The markers,” she said. “The little plastic counters. They’re gone.”

Her stomach sank. Everyone had come. Grandma had brought her special cushion. And now there was nothing to mark the cards with.

“Oh no,” said Tam. “We’ll have to call it off.”

“Call it off?” said a voice behind them. A boy of about ten, with sand on his knees and a bucket in his hand, was looking at them as if they had said something very silly. “You don’t need counters. You just need things.”

His name was Beano. He tipped his bucket out onto the blanket. Shells. Small round pebbles. A green bottle cap. Three buttons. A dried bean he’d found in his pocket.

“In my nan’s day they used dried beans,” said Beano. “That’s why some people call the game beano. A marker is just a marker. It only has one job.”

“What job?” asked Tam.

“To say: this number’s been called.” Beano put a shell on Ama’s number fourteen. “That’s all. It doesn’t matter what it is.”

Ama looked at the shell. It was true. A plastic counter on fourteen and a shell on fourteen meant exactly the same thing.

Soon everyone was hunting. Uncle Duc found a handful of pebbles. Grandma had a tin of buttons in her bag. The little ones raced up and down the tideline collecting the smallest shells they could find.

“Wait,” said Tam, holding up a big flat stone. “This covers two numbers at once.”

“Then it’s a bad marker,” said Beano. “If it covers two, you don’t know which one was called. One marker, one number.”

“And we all have to agree,” Ama added. “Shells mean called. Not shells sometimes and buttons other times meaning something else.”

Beano nodded, very serious. “Same meaning, all the way round the blanket.”

So the game began. Ama turned the cage; Tam called; shells and pebbles and buttons went down on the cards one at a time. When Grandma got a line, she lifted her buttons off one by one to check, and every one sat on a called number.

As the sun dropped into the sea, Ama felt the worried feeling melt away completely. The game wasn’t spoiled at all. It was better, somehow, because everyone had helped make it.

“Thanks, Beano,” she said.

Beano shrugged, pleased. “It’s not the counters that make the game,” he said. “It’s everybody agreeing what the counters mean.”

In the call book, Ama wrote: Any marker works. One marker, one number. Everyone agrees what it means.