by Dan Smith
Helena was wearing a black vest, the same one she’d worn that day in the forest when she’d cut the tree and shown how strong she was. A vest that had once been soaked with sweat but was now soaked with something so different.
Her dark hair was matted with blood, pushed away from her face, which was bleeding from one side. It was difficult to tell exactly where she was hurt, there was so much blood. Her eyes were unfocused and her face was half-turned away from the camera, but there was no doubt it was Helena.
Seeing her like that stopped my heart and filled me with an overwhelming clutter of relief, fear, longing, anger. She was alive, or at least she was when the photograph was taken.
I looked for a date, seeing that it was posted in the early hours of the morning.
There were other pictures – of fire in the dark, of twisted motorcycles, of two young men carrying a girl between them, her head lolling back, her hair hanging heavy with concrete dust. I tore myself away from the images, trying to read the copy, trying to find a sense of the scale of what had happened. My eyes scanned the words, but I had difficulty filtering their meaning through my emotion. Something about a bomb in a nightclub in Kuta, possibly two. The details were vague. Speculation. Confusion. Most of the reporting centred around the destruction. Many were killed. A senseless tragedy. Eyewitness accounts, but nothing about her. Nothing about Helena other than her face staring out from the screen.
But I knew where she was. I had seen her. She was close.
I pinched my eyes for a moment and concentrated. It took me less than a minute to decide what I was going to do. Perhaps I already knew. Perhaps I knew what I had to do the moment I saw the photo.
I printed the picture, logged out of the computer, paid the tariff. Now I had a purpose again. A destination.
As I returned to my room to collect what I needed before I made the trip back to Kuta, I looked at the picture in my hand. The expression on her face, the blood, the wreckage behind her. It reminded me what I’d been through. It reminded me why I needed to go to her. I had made a promise to Helena, and I wasn’t going to let her down.
In the reception area of my losmen, the television was on, continuous footage displayed on the screen, the incomprehensible voices reporting over the top. Images of fire, of destruction. Police vehicles and ambulances, blasted buildings, smouldering fires, faces twisted in agony. And so much blood.
There was a throng of young people here, westerners and locals, crowding inside, looking in at the open windows, all standing silent and watching the violence. There were tears and open mouths and eyes wide with disbelief. This was supposed to be paradise.
For a moment I looked around at these people and I thought about our own paradise in the trees, and how easily that had been shattered. I thought about Helena, lurching from one nightmare to another, and I remembered the others. Poor dead Freia. Matt, Jason, Alban, all of them lying buried beneath the soil. And when I thought about Kurt and Michael and Domino, I realised it was the first time I had considered they might have been caught up in it. And I knew that I didn’t care what happened to them. They didn’t matter any more. All that mattered was Helena.
I turned away and headed out.
The bus to Kuta was busy and tension was heavy in the air. For once, there was no music blaring, and the other passengers were sombre. Many of them westerners, making a pilgrimage to their former place of worship or, like me, looking for someone who was lost.
Beside me, squeezed into the small bench seat, a girl, younger than me, her face a mask of worry, her eyes staring ahead, her hands clasped together.
I folded the printed picture of Helena and put it into my pocket. ‘Looking for someone?’ I asked her. It felt wrong, speaking aloud like that, but there was no way of escaping the truth. Not talking about it wouldn’t make it go away.
At first she didn’t reply, as if she thought I was talking to someone else. When she did speak, it was to her hands. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
‘Me too.’
She kept her head down. ‘You think you’ll find them?’ Her voice was filled with worry.
‘I have to think that,’ I said. ‘Yes. I’ll find her.’
Now she looked at me. Her pale skin, her wide eyes. ‘They didn’t want to see Kintamani. Said they wanted to stay by the beach for a bit longer.’ She turned and looked at the girl sitting behind us. ‘So we went on our own.’
The girl behind leaned forward and put her hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘They’ll be fine.’
‘We should swap seats,’ I said, feeling intrusive. ‘You sit here.’ I moved into the aisle, squeezing through the standing passengers.
Both girls thanked me with a forced smile, but neither of them spoke again. For the remainder of the journey, they sat close together, their arms linked.
The bus came to a standstill on the outskirts of Kuta, trapped among the other vehicles flooding to the area. For a while we all stayed where we were, rooted to our seats, then a murmur began at the front of the vehicle, working its way back to me, people beginning to speak, beginning to move. Following the crowd, I left my seat and shuffled off the bus.
Coming out into the day, I could see that the bus wasn’t going anywhere. The streets were gridlocked, yet quiet. There wasn’t the usual shouting and honking of horns that went hand in hand with an Asian traffic jam. The mood here was different from what I had seen before.
Further ahead, men in police uniforms, rifles over their shoulders, signalling to vehicles to stop. The roads were sealed off, and I guessed that we must be close to the site of the bomb. I moved to one side of the road and took the photograph of Helena from my pocket. It was creased where I had folded it, a cross on the page, intersecting the face of the woman who was helping to keep Helena on her feet. I stared at the picture, then looked up at the scene before me. She was out there somewhere. She was out there and I would find her.
51
Moving past the stationary vehicles and through to the roads that the police had sealed off from traffic, everything seemed normal. Quiet, but normal. There were fewer people on the streets, but there was nothing to suggest anything of magnitude had taken place. I even saw westerners in swimming trunks and costumes going about their business as if nothing had happened. Life goes on. Some things touch only the lives of others. Some are spared.
I looked at each of them in turn, searching for any sign of Helena.
I moved down the street leading to the nightclub, thinking that the best way to find Helena was to go to the hospitals, but something was drawing me onwards. Something wanted me to see what had happened. I could’ve gone round, avoided the horror of what lay somewhere ahead, but I wanted to pass through it, to see it, to satisfy myself that Helena was not there, among the walking wounded. Or lying dead on a street with only a thin white sheet to protect her dignity.
Pressing on, subdued, normality was crushed by dreadful intrusion. I passed two police cordons, slipping through crowds of onlookers that had gathered. Here the damage was more obvious: shop fronts blown out, debris across the road. Shattered glass was strewn about the street, crunching underfoot, and when I finally came to it, the scale of the devastation crushed me. The Sari nightclub, which I’d seen when I was last here, was now just a skeleton of steel and concrete. Ragged rebars of metal were exposed in the broken columns that had once held a roof. A dark hole had opened up nearby, leaving nothing but twisted fingers of metal, charred wood and seared concrete. The neighbouring buildings were gutted from the force of the blast and the ensuing fires. The smell of burning was thick in the air, challenged only by the smell of death. I stopped, awestruck by the scene before me: wisps of smoke rising from the piles. Men sifting, searching. Bystanders staring. Cars overturned, scorched, tyres melted. One vehicle with its doors blown open, its roof bulged and burst. Hell on earth. This was a long way from the beauty of Toba.
Teams of policemen combed the debris, searching for survivors and evidence. A group of men, each of
them wearing blue tracksuit trousers and blue shirts, carried a stretcher high on their shoulders. The occupant of the stretcher lay limp, one arm dangling. Police, like soldiers in their military uniforms and their shouldered rifles, tried to keep people away, while remaining tactful, understanding the grief of people unable to tear themselves from this place.
I approached a woman who was standing alone, watching the policemen. I took the photograph from my pocket and held it up to her, asking if she had seen Helena. She stared through the paper as if it wasn’t there. She had nothing for me; she was holding a photograph of her own. I moved on, passing an impromptu Hindu ceremony in the rubble, attended by people whose faces were blank with disbelief. Candles were lit and prayers recited. I sensed that the world had moved on. It had changed, mutated by fire and smoke and hate.
Coming away from the site, heading towards the beach, I saw many people, wandering, dazed like zombies, grief contorting their faces as they searched for their loved ones and tried to come to terms with what they had experienced. In the road ahead of me, a small group was talking to an older couple, shaking their heads, tightening their mouths. The older couple thanked them and headed towards me. Something inside me wanted them to carry on, pass me by, but they slowed their pace, looked at me with hopeful eyes.
‘We’re searching for our daughter,’ the man said. ‘Simone. She’s about this high.’ He raised his hand to shoulder level. ‘Dark hair. Pretty.’ His eyes were ringed red. ‘Sixteen. Just sixteen years old. She was with her friend.’
His wife remained quiet, her eyes begging me to know where her daughter was.
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I … I haven’t seen anyone.’
The man looked down at the photograph in my hand. ‘Are you looking for someone, too?’
I nodded and lifted the picture. He studied it for a moment before looking back at me.
‘Have you tried the hotels?’ he asked. ‘Some people have been taken there. The ones with burns …’ He took a deep breath. ‘They’ve been putting them in the swimming pools to ease the burns.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He forced a smile and moved on, heading towards the place I’d just come from. I turned and watched them go, hand in hand, searching for their daughter. When they rounded the corner, I continued to stare for a while before shaking myself and making my way to the beach. The man’s advice had been kind, but I had seen the photograph of Helena and I knew that she was not burned. She was here somewhere and she was alive.
On the beach more candles, more grievers sitting vigil for the dead. The eerie quiet, the breaking of the waves on the shore. There were many westerners and locals together, bringing flowers to this spot. I watched a Balinese child, three or four years old, smiling, running to the surf, casting flowers into the waves.
I trudged the sand, searching for Helena, asking at every opportunity, but I was just one of many looking for the lost – people exchanging photos, names, stories, sharing a common bond. I showed my picture to a group of Australians, three big men, who shook their heads, ‘Sorry mate,’ and showed me a picture in return.
‘No.’
‘You tried Sanglah?’
‘Hm?’
‘Sanglah,’ he said again. ‘The hospital. Someone said that’s where they took everyone. Well, most of them. We’re going there now; you wanna tag along?’
‘Sure.’
We walked to a spot on Jalan Raya Kuta where a number of dark-blue Bemos had collected to ferry passengers to Denpasar. Fixing a price with the driver was usually a matter of good-or sometimes bad-natured haggling, but this time the pricing was a muted affair as one of the four men I had joined nodded to the driver and we all climbed in.
There were one or two others inside already, facing each other on the bench seats that ran lengthways inside the vehicle. On a normal day, the walkway between us would be a death trap of luggage, household belongings and animals, but today was not a normal day. Today was the end of the world.
After a few minutes, the minibus started and we pulled away, leaving Kuta and heading towards Sanglah hospital.
As the vehicle swayed and rocked, I looked down at my hands and realised that I still had the photograph of Helena clutched in my fingers. I studied it once more, then refolded it and slipped it into my pocket.
‘Girlfriend?’ asked one of the Australians.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Well, maybe. Yeah. I suppose she is in a way.’
Under other circumstances he might have considered my answer strange, but he just smiled a tight-lipped smile and nodded his head. He looked out of the window behind me, then he glanced at me again and extended a hand. ‘John,’ he said.
‘Alex.’ I took his hand and returned the shake.
‘And these guys here are Danny and Angus.’
I leaned forwards to look along the line at the man sitting two people down from me.
‘It’s the red hair and the freckles that got him the name,’ John said. The touch of levity that had skimmed his voice disappeared when he spoke again. ‘We’re looking for his brother. Jamie.’
‘What happened?’
John shrugged and shook his head. ‘We were in the club, drinking too much beer, having a good time. I guess we were lucky being right at the back. The ones near the front …’ John stopped and gazed across at his friends. ‘Shit, we only got here yesterday. Went straight to SCs.’
‘Sari Club?’ I asked. ‘You were in the Sari Club?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘There was a bang. An explosion, I guess, then, about ten seconds later another one. The second one, though, that’s what knocked me off my feet. All that smoke, the heat, we tried to stick together but I dunno what happened to Jamie.’ He let his eyes fall on Angus, who was hanging his head, wringing his hands.
‘Shit, I saw things … when we got out of there. The whole place was like something out of a movie. A war movie. People trying to help. I tried to help, too, but …’
I glanced over at Angus, doubting that he wanted to hear what John was saying, but at the same time I understood that John needed to purge himself. You keep things like that inside you, they eat you alive.
John lowered his voice. ‘This guy. Crawling along the street. I went to help him, pull him up, get him standing, but when I got to him.’ He stopped speaking, swallowed. ‘He had no feet, man. No feet. And there was half a woman, just lying there. A kid, younger than me with his eyes burned right out of his head, screaming.’ John’s own eyes glazed over as he spoke and a dampness welled around the lower lids. He squeezed his eyes and the tears formed, bulging and running down his cheeks. He put his hands to his face to cover himself. It was probably the first time he’d stopped to think about what he’d seen.
52
Arriving at Sanglah hospital was as close to a living nightmare as I ever wanted to come.
I hadn’t witnessed the horrors of the previous night, but what lay in wait for me here was bad enough. There were people everywhere outside the main building. Locals looking for loved ones or just come to see what was happening. Soldiers trying to organise the crowds, nurses in long white dresses with petite hats perched on their heads. Men in jeans and shirts with masks covering their faces, bystanders pulling their shirts over their mouths and noses to cover the smell of death. Onlookers peering over the opaque plastic that was wrapped from pillar to pillar around one veranda area that now housed rows of bodies shrouded in white sheets. No more room in the morgue. Bags of ice strewn among them in a vain effort to keep them from the cruel heat of the sun.
I stayed close to John and his friends, and we followed the makeshift signs that led us to a crisis centre on the second floor where we were met by westerners in the attire of holidaymakers. They looked tired, drained, and I guessed they were volunteers. People who had stopped to help. I admired their calm understanding in the face of so much pain and desperation.
A young man took us past the crowded noticeboards over-flowing with pictures
and names and numbers, people thronging round, fighting to leave their messages. We came to a reception desk on a worn, red-tiled terrace where we offered the names of the people we were searching for.
‘Jamie Biggs,’ John told the woman behind the desk, and as John and his friends looked through the list with the woman, another volunteer spoke to me.
‘Who are you looking for?’ he asked.
‘Helena.’ It was only then I realised I didn’t know her last name.
The man looked at me. Anywhere else, on any other day he might have told me I was wasting his time. But this wasn’t anywhere else. It wasn’t just any day. ‘Helen?’
‘Helena.’
He showed me a sympathetic smile. ‘This might take a while,’ he said, running a finger down his list. ‘Helena?’
I nodded and studied the upside-down list, chasing his finger. I became oblivious to everything around me. I didn’t hear the weeping, the shouting, the frustration. I didn’t take any notice of the volunteers distributing cups of tea and cheeseburgers. It was only when someone tapped my arm that I resurfaced and the sounds came rushing back.
I turned to see John, smiling beside me. ‘They’ve got him,’ he said. ‘Jamie. He’s downstairs somewhere. They’re taking us now.’
‘Oh. That’s great,’ I said. ‘Brilliant.’
‘You?’
‘Nothing yet.’
‘Well, good luck, mate.’
‘Yeah. Thanks.’
John paused, a moment of understanding passing between us, something shared, then he turned and followed his friends into the crowd.
‘I’m afraid we don’t have anyone called Helen,’ the man said from behind the desk.
‘Helena.’
‘Sorry. Yes. Helena. No one at all. These are just the known patients, though. There’s something else we can try.’
I followed him to another room, air-conditioned, where he passed me into someone else’s care and, under the harsh fluorescent lights, we trawled through a list of missing people, then a list of those who were known to be dead.