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naked. Once, when they had kissed, she had felt something push against her thigh. A hot rush of blood spread across her face at this memory and she giggled inside herself as she recalled the naivety with which she had originally supposed him to have had something in his pocket. Perhaps next week, in his father’s flat they would go upstairs together. Perhaps – ‘Where is “The Harbour, Tobermorey”?‘
    ‘Hey!’ Portia snatched the card from Gordon’s hands. ‘That’s private! Oh no!’
    Portia looked down in horror. Her oily thumb had smeared across the card obliterating a whole trail of Ned’s careful writing.
    ‘No!’ she wailed. ‘It’s ruined! Ruined! How could you! You, you fucker!’
    ‘Hey, I’m sorry. I was only –‘
    Portia ran into the house, tears springing from her eyes. Gordon watched her go, shrugged and rearranged his khaki shorts to alleviate the discomfort of a pressing erection.
    Gordon wondered if it was the fact of her being in love that awoke such a flood of desire within him. He considered that he might be just as much in love himself, only where he came from the phrase ‘got the hots for’ was more acceptable. Even most British kids, he had noticed, would rather say ‘I fancy her’ than ‘I love her.
    The way Portia confided in him so instantly on his arrival in London had done more to disorient him than the strange food, incomprehensible accents and bewildering geography of the place. He had expected from the British Fendemans more of the chilly reticence and uptight reserve that his father used to talk about when explaining the irrefutable logic of his leaving England for America. Portia’s directness not only confused Gordon, it needled him too. It was as if her emotions were more profound than anyone else’s. Her very ability to describe them so freely and expressively stopped him from being able to say anything open and honest about himself and he hated that. He had feelings too and right now he felt like he wanted to take this virgin, lay her in a bed and fuck her till her eyes popped out.
    That was the crazy injustice of it. She had painted him so far into a corner that the only territory left him was that of a predatory animal. It was so totally unfair. He wasn’t like that. He was a good man, a feeling man with a feeling man s heart. He could be charming. He could be romantic. But she gave him no chance to be. Mr Wonderful, Mr Perfect absorbed her whole being. Gordon could see in her eyes that whenever she responded warmly to him she was really responding to Ned. By talking about him so much she had planted the faggoty English goy asshole right inside his head. It was like he was the host to a parasite, and the parasite’s name was Ned Maddstone.
    If his mother and father had died a year earlier, Gordon would have met Portia just at the moment she was ready to give her whole being to someone. But he had been just too late. By the time he arrived the door was already closed to him. That’s why now he felt like he wanted to batter it down and splinter it into pieces. All he had needed was to have been given a
chance.
The chance to knock gently and have her open up, but instead the door was locked against him and the key had been turned by Ned Maddstone.
    Ned fucking Maddstone.
    Gordon did not think of himself as a bad man, but he knew that lately he had been having bad thoughts. He had stopped being able to think of the shock of seeing his father tumble in a heap to the ground in front of him, roaring in pain and clutching at his throat. He had lost any sense of his mother, retaining only the memory of his suffocating desire to get out of the hospital and into the open air, away from that thin, yellow-skinned woman with a tube up her nose and a frightened look in her eyes.
    He had considered his new situation on the flight over.
    ‘One, these guys are atheists,’ he had said to himself. ‘Saturdays, I won’t have to go to synagogue. Two, they’re anti-Zionist. I