THE Bali Bombing Memorial in Jalan Legian, Kuta, sits in flowers and bubbles with water. The calm is at odds with the chaos of the surrounding streets.

Here, motorbikes hit the footpath when their riders run out of spare road. They twist and grunt through the throngs of tourists as well as the odd cat and dog. And the touts, of course, who sidle up to offer massages or transport.

Exhaust fumes fight with incense. Horns compete with the nearest set of speakers in the circus of blurs and commotions. After dark, when the volume dial is cranked, the nightclubs heave and pulse, and base beats thump through the pavement.

If the Bali bombers sought to rid Kuta of western excess, they failed. Women in bikinis splash on billboards facing ground zero, where two bombs exploded within seconds of one another at 11.08pm, 10 years ago.

The bombing memorial sits between the detonation points, which go almost unmarked. A small globe in the road is the only hint of the car bomb outside the Sari Club, now a dusty carpark where patrons are said to spill out from the bars and relieve themselves.

This revelation has upset bombing victims in the past few days. As for the Paddy's Bar suicide bomber explosion? Paddy's Bar would pump again, just under another name.

Life stopped when the bombs went off. Ask Sue O'Donnell, mother of Amber, 27, from Melbourne, who clasped a photo of her daughter on visiting the memorial on Wednesday: "It's just a nightmare you never wake up from."

Yet a way of life went on, too, for Bali - eventually, anyway. Locals say Kuta now bustles like never before. Foreign tourism was up 10 percent last year and it is expected to double by 2015.

In Kuta each morning, the shop owners blast away the grime from last night's revelry, and conjure new pitches to separate the rupiahs from the tourists. The obvious jag in the story arc is the golden shrine to sadness in the decadence, the "sacred place" as so many Australians have called the memorial in the past few days.

Here, the victims of the bombings, and their relatives, are easy to pick from the tourists. Most memorial pilgrims wear singlets and long faces. The bombing victims are the ones who don't pose for photos among themselves. They don't linger. They've spent a long time talking about that night, or not talking about it.

If they're here to heal, they must again confront what they try to forget. To "move forward", they must again look back. They tend to scoff at words such as "closure". There are ways ahead, but they say their pain meanders down paths uncharted by those who weren't there.

Two Sari Club victims amplify contrasts in their approach. Phil Britten's burn scars are pasted across his back and arms like clumps of melted plastic. The Perth ex-footballer, who lost seven mates, holds a press conference at the memorial. Later, he speaks about the discipline of compartmentalising feelings.

"This is the time of the year to remember the good times and remember the bad times," he says. "I'm busy running around the rest of the year."

Earlier the same day, Adelaide's Michael Curtis turns up. The former Sturt footballer wipes at his face. He doesn't seem certain of himself, and looks unaware of the media pack trailing him. "This is my first time back here," he explains, absently, before wandering down the street with his wife, Stacey.

Among victims is an abiding sense that life, and death, is no more than random chance. Some victims still grapple with this and the confusion of survivor's guilt. They say they find greatest solace in being close to the source of their greatest pain.

"Why did I get out and somebody else didn't? asks Jessica Lee, 29, of Geelong. "That's huge."

On arriving in Bali on Wednesday, she expected to feel an initial jar on seeing the Sari Club site for perhaps the eighth time since she escaped through the thatch roof that 2002 night.

She'll have a beer there tonight with friends. A loud bang or a poor joke can take her back to when everything went black. Even now, she punishes herself with unfair thoughts. Who may have she have stomped on to climb out?

Daniel Mortensen, now 42, was a Coogee Dolphin who lost six mates in the Sari bombing. He, too, has been long stung with guilt. Frankly, he has "struggled" and shifted cities and jobs in the pursuit of settling down. He left the Sari Club less than an hour before the bombing - as he explains at the memorial's base, because he'd drunk so much that night, he could drink no more.

Curtis may be alive only because of the death of Adelaide's Bob Marshall. You know this because Marshall's son, David, arrives at the memorial to explain that his father, a club oldie, happened to be standing next to Curtis. His dad, then 69, wore the force of the blast. Marshall went to the Sari Club only 40 minutes before the explosions, "to check on the boys".

Karen Farkas turns up. She chose not to go to the Sari Club that night. She was tired. Seven of her Sydney eastern suburbs friends, and two of their children went for a dance after dinner and didn't come back.

Another of that same group, Sam Garlick, wells up a short time later at the memorial. She, too, could have been there except that her two-year-old son was slow to settle at the hotel.

Brendan Barry, from Cairns, got to the Sari Club 10 minutes before the blasts. He was standing in what would be later described as the "kill zone", about five metres from the car blast where 700kg of explosive went off next to his friend, Jodie Cearns.

Barry doesn't know why he survived and she didn't.

Today, at the memorial, is his first trip back to Bali. His softly-spoken manner supports his claim that he harbours no resentments about his years of physical and emotional torment. To his surprise, it feels "good" to be back here, so far at least. He's a better man than 10 years ago, he says, not in spite of the bombing, but because of it.

Jim Vickers, from St Albans in Melbourne, is at the memorial, too. He was running late to meet friends at the Sari Club. He was flattened as he headed out his hotel room door.

His waiting friends died. He would be officially recognised for his rescue efforts - to this day, Vickers does not grasp the cosmic logic of these diverging fates.

He says 10 years is ample time for marriages to be toasted and lost, for babies to be born and raised, for fresh starts in new cities and for journeys fruitful and wasted.

Yet 10 years is also just a number. "People say, it's 10 years, you should be right," Vickers says. "Well, I can tell you, your brain doesn't work like that."

Those affected by the bombings are each haunted, one way or another. This is hardly an Australian preserve.

On Tuesday, a local rescuer (and Muslim cleric) Haji Agus Bambang Priyanto launched his Bali Bombing book at the memorial, in a blaze of flower petals and dancers.

Then a traffic policeman, in 2002 he cradled an Australian woman whose chest was ripped open by glass. She bled out as she gazed at him.

"It makes me feel guilty," he says. "She wanted to say something but it was too late. It was too late for me to help her."

Marshall, like Mortensen, will never fully recover from his visit to the Bali morgue.

His visions - the white tiles, the blood, the body fluids, the charred remains of indeterminable sex, piled - would later follow him on supermarket visits.

Few Aussies compelled to attend the Bali morgue, it seems, have ever fully got over it. (Nor have locals - one tells of trying to answer a mobile phone in the jeans pocket of a dismembered body, then later meeting the caller, the wife of the deceased.) "Not all of Dad came home," Marshall says.

Marshall is thick and fleshy, and not someone you'd think to cross. But his face sags softly in exposing his grief.

He pulls down his singlet to reveal his Dad tattoo on his heart. His loss is a big part of his essence. The way he tells it, his loss is like our loss, too.

"There's still a sense of disbelief that we're a part of something so evil," he says.

It was a long time ago, he says. But when Marshall attends today's official 10th anniversary service, the Bali Bombing will "feel like yesterday".

Perhaps for him, and so many others, it always will.