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a kind of daze as morning turned into afternoon, like survivors of our own mini-earthquake. Peter looked shivery and underdressed, with just the flimsiest of AC/DC tour t-shirts under his big leather jacket. We had no real reason to stay here – the record shops catered for neither my love of adult-oriented rock nor Peter’s yen for obscure Norwegian blood metal, the lone guitar shop we found was closed, and the unnaturally high quota of baseball caps and ‘Everything’s A Pound!’ stores was spirituallyunsettling – but something unfathomable dictated that we didn’t quite feel ready to leave. As we’d watched Ed limp off up the street towards his snail-infested flat, cape flapping in the wind, we’d seen two teenage boys gesticulate and shout towards him from an adjacent street. The boys were roughly Peter’s age, and their comments – not quite loud enough for Ed or us to hear, but loud enough to convince the teenagers, in their minuscule minds, that they were doing something extremely brave – almost certainly didn’t relate to what a stylish fellow our busking friend was. It suddenly occurred to me that Ed might not have been wholly comfortable in Peter’s presence. Teenagers were probably the bane of his existence. I wondered about Peter, and how he would have behaved towards Ed on his own, or with his friends.
    â€˜Were you unsettled by him?’ I enquired, as we strolled along the seafront.
    â€˜Neh,’ said Peter. ‘Not really. I was a bit worried when he got the axe out. But that was sort of cool as well.’
    â€˜But his stories must have made you a bit sad?’
    â€˜Yeah, sort of. I dunno. But I thought he might have been making some stuff up. Like the women.’ Ed had talked about ‘girls’ a lot – how their quality differed from town to town – in the manner that you might expect of someone a third of his age. ‘He seemed to think he could pull anyone, which was weird, with him being so old and dressing like that. And the knife fights and that – I wasn’t sure if they were true. And some of the bad stuff – he seemed to have, like, brought it upon himself. I mean, it was obvious he should have signed to that record label.’
    â€˜Yeah, but people were kind of naïve in the Sixties. They had lots of silly ideas about The Man, and sticking it to him. Ed was probably a bit like everyone else: he didn’t want to sell his soul to the devil. But while everyone else just pretended, Ed actually followed the whole thing through. And look where it left him.’
    â€˜Yeah. Fighting Tapeworm.’
    â€˜You didn’t fancy going to his flat then?’
    â€˜Neh.’
    To me, Ed was properly three-dimensional: hyper-real. Half of me wanted to drive him back to London, offer him a bed for the night and put out his records for him. The other half was slightly frightened of him. For days, even weeks after I met him, he was there, at the edge of my conscience. I wanted to write a book about him, a film. Yet I already felt guilty for exploiting him by using him as part of Peter’s education.
    What I couldn’t quite gauge was how real he was to Peter. How would he describe Ed to his friends? As a mad old guy who thought he was Robin Hood, or as a fascinating relic? Would he even mention him to them? When he got back to his natural environment, would he see Ed in the same way as the fourteen-year-old me had seen Daft George, the man who had minced up and down the lane where my gran lived, reciting poetry while dressed in a kaftan and a hard hat? In other words: in a small-minded way which ignored the baggage of personal history? It was hard to tell.
    Back in the car, as we trundled along the coast road behind what seemed like every one of South East England’s most wheezing, sluggish HGVs, Peterslipped into one of his stoical phases. That is to say, one of his even-more-stoic-than-normal