We used to go to a club in Soho called Hive. It was beside some ruins that still hadn’t been rebuilt after the Blitz. It was a place for gay and queer people that closed in early 1969. David played there once, as did several others of our musician friends. To get in you had to knock on a small green-framed door on a short street, and an eye on the other side of the peephole would ask if we were members, though there was no membership, Hive wasn’t White’s, and that was just a strategy to avoid the police. A dirty mirror on the wall, feather boas, cheap high heels, tall men teetering atop platform shoes, and the best music in the city. For a time, I gave Tarot readings at a little table near the bar. One night, when I was drunk, a blue-eyed boy asked for a reading. He was so thin he looked sick with TB, and so beautiful he looked like a girl from Carnaby Street. In fact, it took me a minute to decide whether he was male or female. Unable to hold back, I told him all about the theory of androgynous magic: solve et coagula and why Baphomet has the torso of a man and the breasts of a woman. I explained about the number 11, the number of homoerotic magic, which represents the double phallus. I taught him that all magical instruments must be doubles, two swords, two wands, two cups, two pentacles, and why occultists should all be homosexual. He thought it was funny. He wasn’t interested in what I was saying. He listened to me as if to a madwoman. The boy spoke Polari with astonishing ease and I told Stephen to please take him home, please let me see them together, but Stephen likes masculine men and I had to content myself with staring at him until he left. Quit recruiting, Stephen told me, annoyed.

At Hive, Stephen made crude, vulgar jokes and knew almost everyone there, because he’d slept with half of them and gone to school with the other half. Once, I led Laura by the hand to the bathroom and we ended up screaming, me holding on to the sink and Laura on her knees, and we made such a scene that some queens getting high in a corner applauded and asked for an encore. We used to lose Stephen, and Tara too, when they went to Regent’s with their occasional lovers, or took them back to Cheyne Walk. But Laura and I would walk until dawn, taking different routes each time. We’d end up at Hawksmoor’s church in Spitalfields, the area where Jack the Ripper committed his crimes. When she met Juan, Laura spent hours explaining Hawksmoor’s churches to him, and he took photos for his brother Luis and mailed them with a long letter. Laura designed alternative cartographies. Lines on maps that were an underground text capable of divination and prophecy. You had to traverse those alternative paths without thinking, draw the seals standing up, and finally the way would be revealed. Like in alchemy, I told her: they seem like regular walks, but they’re a process. The meaning lies in the time spent on the process, not in the result: the discipline of repetition. That’s it, she replied, enlightened boredom. One night I told her about how Mercedes had made me feed the children she kept locked in cages, how Juan had lightened the task, how Mercedes beat me every day to let me know that I may have found Juan, but she was still the boss; also how Juan let me sleep beside him after the beatings and promised to kill my mother, but hadn’t done it. To defend me, though, he told Mercedes that if she laid another finger on me, he was going to take an overdose of his medication. It’s easy for me to die, he shouted at her, and you’ll lose everything. Mercedes didn’t hit me after that.