Face to face with death

The stench of rotting bodies demoralises you as you enter the door of Madden's chapel on the ground floor of its funeral parlour at the corner of North Street and Rose Lane, right next to the Kingston Public Hospital.

You press your handkerchief hard against your nostrils to shut out the stink, but as you walk further into the unrefrigerated morgue, the sight of distended, grotesquely distorted, bloated bodies, put down hurriedly and randomly on stretchers, intensifies the stench.

A body on a stretcher; four on a gurney; man and woman beside each other. Four bodies stacked two deep. The body of a woman beside a man in red shorts which obviously had been in the sun for more than 48 hours, grotesquely distended, her skin beginning to peel.

By the time you get into the inner room of the morgue, where most of the 16 bodies from west Kingston are, the stench no longer worries you. The bodies look like so many pumped up, mutilated mannequins.

It is the sight of bodies bloated by the sun that sickens you and triggers all sorts of nauseating feelings. Inflated, protruding intestines discourage you from trying to spot the entry wound. You have to grit your teeth to prevent yourself from vomiting -- and the feeling is not merely physical.

You can't believe what your eyes and nose and brain tell you you've seen.

You simply have never seen so many "stale bodies" all together. You are not at the site of a major train crash or any such serious tragedy. You have never even seen so many dead dogs in your life -- certainly not in the same place. And you wouldn't have left the body of your pet dog to the elements for so long. You would have buried it within hours.

You leave the morgue and you wonder if your eyes had fooled you.

You go back in the morgue and you realise you had left other persons there; and not inured morgue attendants either.

There are policemen with flimsy latex gloves and inadequate dust masks dutifully, diligently at work "processing the bodies"; fingerprinting them, swabbing their hands to determine if they had fired guns in the last 48 hours, estimating their ages, determining the location of the wounds that killed them, tagging them.

All in a day's work. Every so often they take a break. It's not just the routine that gets to them -- it's the smell and the sight. Some of their number, journalists even, refuse to enter the morgue. Their superiors understand; they don't insist. They just couldn't stomach it.

But life goes on. For some morgue workers, it's lunchtime. The sight of them hurrying off the street with scandal bags with their lunches just bought from one of the few neighbourhood shops that remain open, draw a chuckle from soldiers and policemen on duty nearby.

Soldiers with automatic assault rifles are on guard from the points of vantage on the upper floor of Madden's funeral parlour. Policemen beside them tote M16 and AR15 rifles and Uzi submachine guns.

On the ground, soldiers patrol the area -- rounding up any neighbourhood man they find on the street. They line up a group, order them to clasp their hands behind their heads and march them to the Hannah Town Police Station a few hundred metres away, for processing. They go quietly.

A soldier orders a 17-year-old and a much older man from Rose Lane to join the detainees.

As a Senior Police Officer questions one of the shirtless men, a soldier seeks to move him on. (Young men in the ghettos often opt to go shirtless to make it obvious they have no concealed guns). The Police Officer pulls his rank and takes charge of the situation.

The soldier wants to argue. He mutters, "The problem is that too many people in charge". His colleague silences him.

The older man says he lives a 42 1/2 Rose Lane and was actually roasting two breadfruits in the street when the soldier forced him to join them.

He pleads with the police officer for just one favour -- to have an officer go back with him to shut his room door. He was in luck. The senior police officer, after questioning them, told them both to go their way.

Back in the office the smell of the morgue comes back at times. It is haunting -- frightening. You sniff your sleeves. But you were sure there had been no contact.

Suddenly you remember a morgue attendant saying they had seven more bodies to pick up from West Kingston.

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