How We Met. Katy Regan

him so (such a complicated child, we’ve no idea where we got him from …) and this was how he experienced life: it came in peaks and troughs that he couldn’t predict or control very successfully and, in one day alone, he could go from a moment of intense joy – like those few seconds between finishing a gig and the applause; was there a finer moment in life than that? – to bouts of melancholy, which saw him take to his room to strum on his guitar and listen intently to lyrics and maybe to write some. He came up with his best work when in the throes of melancholia.

      He doubted he had ever really experienced ‘happiness’ as such, if happiness was the sort of unquestioning confidence he saw in his peers on his philosophy course. He had chosen philosophy, not because he had done it at A level (he’d done sciences) but because to him, it was the sort of subject you could only do at university.

      He was the first of his family to go; most of his mates were staying back in Bury to resit their A levels or get jobs in plumbing or as fitness instructors and he wanted something that sounded impressive and brainy when they asked. ‘Computer science’ didn’t quite cut it, but philosophy? Now that was good.

      Fraser loved his mates back home but sometimes he did yearn for something slightly more than the pub, and hoped that in a philosophy course he’d find that. He imagined it would be full of cool, interesting people who possibly wore scarves and scurried across campus carrying piles of ancient books and having ‘ideas’. Fraser very much liked ideas, he saw himself as relatively deep and sensitive. In reality, though, philosophy seemed to be a course chosen by earnest and yet alpha types with whom Fraser had nothing in common, and he felt a bit lost in lectures, scared to participate in case he said something rubbish and sounded too northern.

      Those guys seemed to know instinctively what they wanted out of life. Fraser wanted to be in a band: he sang and played guitar and imagined that first album cover where he and Norm (drummer) and the two other members of the Fans (Fraser, Andy, Norm and Si – an acronym of the four members; they thought that was pretty slick) would be photographed in some ironically old-fashioned living room looking moody and emaciated, although he wasn’t sure Norm would quite be able to pull off that look at present.

      That was it, he didn’t have a back-up plan. He had no further plans for life. These people, his peers, seemed to know exactly where they were going, whereas life to Fraser was an ever-unfolding mystery, exhilarating at times, but which all too often disappointed him. This was because he had not yet cultivated the art of making himself happy and still made terrible, often catastrophic choices based on fear, not having any better ideas (the moussaka being one such example) and flattery. This had always definitely been the case with girls.

      Fraser was good looking; maybe not everyone’s cup of tea with his unrefined looks but definitely attractive. He was tall, in possession of a good head of hair and (so girls had told him) a pair of ‘beautiful, almond-shaped eyes’, which was a compliment he wafted away only to go home and peer at them in the mirror from different angles. Were they beautiful? Wasn’t that just a cliché handed out by girls when they were drunk and sentimental, which in his experience was pretty much all the time?

      Whatever, Fraser Morgan was never short of female attention, never short of girls throwing themselves at him and telling him he was funny, yes, and ‘layered’, and had lovely eyes.

      Although Fraser was bemused by all this attention, he was also flattered, and it seemed ungrateful and downright rude not to take them up on their offers. So far in one and a half years at Lancaster University, he’d been out with a Becca – one of Melody’s law-course mates, posh and a little bit terrifying. Being with Becca was like some sort of endurance test for the character and, Fraser had to admit, the challenge gave him a twisted thrill.

      After Becca, there was Steph: sweet, clever and thoughtful. She was on his course and was everything Fraser had fantasized that a philosophy student would be like, as in she wore scarves and glasses and sat cross-legged a lot. (Actually this really disturbed him in the end. There is only so long a man can stare at a women’s crotch in tights before they just don’t find them attractive any more.)