Our epicenter was Stephen’s house in Cheyne Walk, near the river in Chelsea. Stephen had chosen it because it had a staircase designed in the thirties by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with a marvelous iron handrail, and, underneath—because it snaked in a curve—a small table was placed atop some slightly arcane art deco mosaics. I moved in with him two months after I arrived in London. It was far away from St. John’s Wood and from Florence, but that helped me get to know the city a little. My bed was always littered with books and albums, like the beds of almost everyone I knew: it was a meeting place, a normal thing among the people who went from Mandrax to hashish, all that languor and lethargy we lived in. Sometimes when Robert spoke we couldn’t understand him, and he had to write down the dates and times of the concerts because his tongue got tied. Incense, Tiger Balm, and sleep.

Laura was the only one who didn’t lead that kind of life. She would lie down beside me, smoking tobacco, and take off the straight masculine pants she wore; I would admire her firm, thin legs while she asked me questions about Juan. She had never attended a Ceremonial, so she’d never met him. Laura was the adopted daughter of Anne Clarke, Florence’s aunt. She was missing her left eye and wore clothes that made it impossible to get an idea of the shape of her body: men’s clothes, and several sizes too big. Her hair was long, though, and always greasy, and she drank atrociously, so much that she tended to get lost, and Stephen would have to go out and search the city for her. He’d find her sleeping in a park or a cemetery, her favorite places, because Laura was, out of all of us, the one who had best studied communication with the dead, or, as they are called in the Order, the discarnate. Her hands would often smell of earth, and sometimes of blood; if she didn’t bathe, she could stink of decomposition. I took care of cleaning her, sometimes: I’d scrub her skin with the sponge and trace the scars she’d given herself when she got too drunk. We read The White Goddess aloud until the water got cold and then, when we dried off, we’d tickle each other and she would bite my ass. She still had her eyelid but refused to wear a glass prosthesis: she preferred a leather patch. I thought she was beautiful.

I met Laura at a ritual at Florence’s house and her ferocity shocked me: the way she used a knife to cut her arm, and shushed the woman who squealed when she had to cut her, too; the way she pronounced the words with authority and without wavering; how she stimulated me until the sexual energy became a palpable thing over my chalk circle; how she addressed the entity we summoned with surprising familiarity. Laura was infallible and demanded respect: she didn’t attend all the rituals, or agree to perform lesser spells. We used to walk around Highgate Cemetery and caress each other atop the graves. I confessed that George Mathers had been my first love; she regretted that the Order hadn’t recovered his body, which was buried in Nigeria.