Waves broke over the sound of children’s laughter. Near the high-water mark, eight-year-old Clara Greensborough cleared a space in the sand. She swept aside dried bluebottles and rotting seaweed. Then she bobbed on her hands and knees and made the outline of a rectangle, like an artist preparing a canvas.
She was resolute. She’d win Make a Man today. The rules of the game were simple: the first one to assemble a human skeleton on the beach was the winner. It couldn’t be that difficult; she’d nearly done it before. The trouble was finding all the bones.
Mick Thistleton, who usually won, stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Clara and her friends launched themselves onto the soft sand dunes, from which bones protruded like the teeth of some subterranean creature. Arm bones, hip bones, thigh bones. Bits of spine, skull, rib. Whitefella bones.
Blackfella bones. Convict bones. Bones as old as mountains.
Bones sun-bleached and shimmering.
Clara shuddered. The bones gave her the creeps but she had to beat Mick. She retrieved a skull with half its jaw missing. She searched for the rest of the jaw so she could give her man a smile.
Clara never knew what she’d find in this massive mound of sand. She understood it was an old cemetery and people had been using it forever. But there were no headstones or flowers.
She’d made plenty of discoveries here: a cricketer’s badge, a cutthroat razor, a tin matchbox. When she was four she’d found a metal plate with writing on it about a shipwreck in 1847.
‘Swap a kneecap for a jawbone?’ Clara asked a boy digging beside her.
‘Get your own,’ he replied.
She frowned. Her skeleton was incomplete, but she was so close. She turned away from the yawning skull to her little sister, Bonnie, who skipped towards her.
‘Why are you crying?’ Bonnie asked.
‘I need a jawbone but I can’t find one.’
‘I saw a whole man on the next beach. Bet he’s got all his
bones.’
‘Whole man?’
‘Washed up like a whale.’
‘Stop telling fibs.’
‘It’s true! You’ll see!’
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