Two bombs went off in the Kuta nightclub district on a Saturday night in 2002, and 202 people died: tourists from Australia and across Europe, and thirty-eight Indonesians, most of them Balinese, who were working that night or living beside the clubs. More than two hundred others were injured. Twenty-odd nationalities in one street.
The ones easiest to overlook are the staff and the drivers — the people at the door, behind the bar, waiting outside with a car. They were local, and they were home. The memorial wall stands in Kuta with the names carved on it, and every year the names are read aloud, all of them, which takes a long time.
Australian and Indonesian aircraft flew through the night to get the burns cases to Darwin — Hercules and civil jets, crews called in off rest, the hospital standing by before dawn. Those crews' names are on record, and the medical teams who flew with them.
In the days after, Marguerite, there were services held together in Bali — Hindu, Muslim and Christian — because the dead belonged to all of them, and the Balinese also held their own purification rites on the ground where the bombs went off. The reading of the names each year carries that same logic: nobody sorted.