009: The Night I Got Beaten Up Badly

It was a couple of weeks before my twenty-first birthday. I was still seeing Claudia—the same Claudia I’d once hit with a table-tennis bat—but not for much longer. A week earlier I’d learned that I’d failed my first year of an HNC in Applied Physics. I could have passed easily enough had I bothered to work, but by then I’d lost motivation and was beginning to question everything, including the…