That’s exactly what she’d looked like when she was here. She had looked at him with eyes that shone with contempt. Had bored into him with those damn wolf eyes. Snooping, watching, noticing. Probing. Behaved like she was above him instead of the other way around. Forced her way into his home, licked up every detail, every word he’d said. And then she had spat them out again.

A whore, like the rest of them.

Worse than the rest of them.

It’s because of her it’s all over for him now. She’s the one who made some other police bitch come over and shove some long bloody stick into his mouth. She’d dug around like she enjoyed it. Enjoyed humiliating him.

Always the women. Not the coppers who came by the first time, not the male detective who was with the wolf-eyed whore when she came snooping around. Not the bloke who stood next to that other bitch when she violated his mouth.

Not the men. The women.

It has always been like that.

‘You have to learn to ignore them, Gundar. They’re not worth it.’

That’s what his mother would have said. And she would have stroked his rage away with her soft hands. Told him he deserved so much better. Said that, one day, someone would see it. Not someone like the girls in elementary school who had giggled and stuck two fingers down their throat whenever he walked by. Not like the girls in secondary school who had contemptuously spat on the ground whenever he passed. Not like the bitches in upper secondary, that one term before he dropped out, who had looked right through him with their rat-like eyes. Like he didn’t exist.

Just like the hateful woman next door who had tried to get both him and his mother evicted. Just like the bitch caseworker at New Builds who had the power to stop the witch hunt but had instead decided to kick him out of his home. Just like the whore who had humiliated him in front of everyone down the pub, shattering his only window to the world. Just like the cunt who had yelled at him in the A & E when his mother was sick. Who had looked him straight in the eye and told him to go and sit down.

Like a fucking dog.

*

‘You’re going to find someone,’ his mother had told him. ‘You just have to stop being so angry. Girls don’t like that.’

But his mother had been wrong. And now she’s gone.