Playing Dead by Elizabeth Greenwood

Author:Elizabeth Greenwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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THE SUBJECT OF JOHN Darwin is a charged one around Seaton Carew and Hartlepool. I met up with musician JB at the Seaton Carew Social Club on a Saturday night to get the local read on Darwin. The front room was filled with older couples playing bingo under fluorescent lights, while in the back bar, men watched the Sunderland-versus-Arsenal soccer match. A rock band played covers upstairs. You can’t smoke inside anymore, but the place still contains the heavy smells of decades of butts, stale beer, and disinfectant. I settled into a booth with JB and a couple of pints and asked him about Darwin.

“The irony about his faked death is that it turned him into a celebrity,” he said. “He has two rooms named after him at the Staincliffe! People who have gone to jail for fraud wouldn’t be too amused. I got heavily fined for fraud in the nineties, but I didn’t become a celebrity. It cost me me marriage,” JB said. One can understand the resentment. When I stepped outside for a smoke, I asked a middle-aged couple for a light, and they asked where I was from. We got to talking, and they were impressed that I had kept such close company with the Canoe Man all week. The woman was clearly tipsy but offered a drunken poetic insight: “When you meet people and really spend time with them, you realize they are good and bad, just like anyone.”

Rumors about Darwin are rampant. That’s what happens when your town becomes known as “Seaton Canoe.” “I heard he knew the person whose identity he stole. It was a person he knew in a coal mining village who did something he didn’t like,” JB said ominously. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that the truth of John Jones is far more prosaic. I’ll bet John Darwin would prefer this strongman version anyway.

“He was a prison officer. That’s where he got the idea for the crime,” a white-haired patron offered. JB thought that there were also positive feelings about Darwin around town: “A lot of people I know think he got one over on the system, and they like it. You’ve seen the news. The government is ripping people off and getting away with it, and profiting off it. In a nation where an ordinary guy like that carries out an act of fraud, they think he got one back on the system.”

Over breakfast the next morning, my mustachioed innkeeper echoed JB’s sentiments: “That’s a funny thing what he did, innit? The nerves to do it! I think he got overpunished. He didn’t hurt anybody, he just fiddled away some money. You look on the news, and you see MPs doing that. The big insurance companies just wanted to make an example of him.”

I am all for getting one back at the system. One day at lunch, I told Darwin of my own debt, the six-figure student loan that not even bankruptcy can absolve. “I’ll show you a place where you can buy a canoe,” he quipped, and we laughed.

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