Confidence

by Rowland Manthorpe

  ‘Basically nothing.’

  Ben caught the ball in one hand. ‘Oh ho!’

  ‘Seriously, nothing like that. Serve. I’ll tell you but I warn you it’s going to sound stupid. I bumped into Anita Wilkins in the George.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘She was deputy head girl at St Stephen’s, the girls’ school nearest mine.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Nothing happened. At all. The point is – I’m only saying this ’cause it’s pertinent – everyone fancied Anita. Remember those school parties where one minute it was incredibly awkward and the next you’d had three beers and were more or less unconscious?’

  ‘Sadly, no.’

  ‘Well, at those parties, she was the girl. I don’t know how else to say it. Anyway, the point is, for what it’s worth, she’d had a few drinks and she let it be known that in sixth form, she fancied me.’

  ‘Wahay, seventeen-year-old Charlie!’

  Charlie smiled sheepishly. ‘She said I was “intriguing”. Clearly, she hasn’t spent a lot of time with me. I know this sounds totally pathetic, but—’

  ‘It got you thinking you weren’t such an ugly, boring bell-end after all.’

  ‘You know me so well. I mean, whenever I saw Anita Wilkins, I was practically sweating with nerves and apparently I still managed to come off as “intriguing”. I dunno . . .’ Charlie shrugged, wide-eyed. ‘Maybe I could be having an exciting relationship that I actually enjoy.’

  ‘It’s that kind of talk that endangers lives.’

  Charlie’s phone beeped in his pocket and he missed an easy backhand.

  ‘Is that Sara?’

  ‘Probably.’ Feeling light-headed, Charlie leaned on the table. ‘It’s like an operation, right? There’s no getting out of it. You’ve just got to be straight but not brutal, in and out, as kind as you can.’

  ‘God knows.’ Ben leaned back, fending off the question. ‘I mean, that sounds right.’ Charlie nodded mechanically. ‘And I suppose . . .’ Ben sidled towards the vending machines, doing keepie-uppies on his bat. ‘I suppose if it doesn’t work out, you can always get back together.’

  2

  What It Is

  So confidence feels right – that’s a bit like saying that happiness feels blissful, or love, lovely. This is the trouble with trying to get at confidence from the point of view of a confident moment: when you’ve got it, it’s self-evident. It’s obvious what it is and where it comes from, which is why there always seems to be more of it round the corner. (Like time: you’ve got loads of it, then suddenly you’re running late.) I find it easier to think about confidence by thinking about what confidence is not.

  What is the opposite of confidence? The opposite of happiness is sadness. The opposite of freedom is imprisonment. But is the opposite of confidence depression? When you’re feeling down, you don’t think, ‘If only I could be confident.’ You think, ‘If only I could be all right’ or ‘If only this would stop.’ Saying that the opposite of confidence is depression feels a bit like saying that the opposite of love is loneliness. If you were loved, you might not feel lonely, but that doesn’t mean that if you weren’t lonely you would be loved, the way you would be free if you left prison. Plus, you can be in love and feel lonely. (It doesn’t make sense when it happens either.)

  When I say ‘what confidence is not’, I don’t mean opposites, not in that black and white way. I mean a less schematic but undeniable experiential difference, like when you’re with someone and you appreciate their company and you respect them, and you don’t fancy them at all. All of a sudden, it’s lightning-clear what attraction is. This, you could say, is the theory of ‘adjacent opposites’.

  The adjacent opposite of confidence would be the feeling you get when you turn up to some event and you become aware that you don’t feel as good as you expected to. You’re not funny or lively; you’re dull and at the same time, edgy. You can’t get comfortable. You become horribly conscious of all your movements and thoughts, even the thought that you’re horribly conscious, which as soon as you’ve had it, becomes the only thought in your head. It’s as if you’ve been separated from yourself, for no good reason – it’s just a party, for Christ’s sake – but you’re out of place, you don’t work properly, and you probably never will.

  It’s not nerves, because nerves pass. Nerves can be settled with a drink, whereas drinking only makes this feeling worse. And, unlike nerves, this feeling can’t be confronted. Trying to fight it is like trying to fight insomnia: the harder you fight, the worse it gets. You’re overthinking, and you can’t fight overthinking with thought.

  Confidence, in a strange way, is acting without thought. It’s not that we stop thinking when we’re confident. Rather, we access a different part of our intelligence, one that is actually faster and more capable than the painstaking connection of cause and effect.

  For want of a better word, I call the adjacent opposite of confidence: self-consciousness.

  Nauseous with guilt, Charlie sat in Sara’s room, waiting for her to get back from the loo. The rain hammered on the plastic roof of the kitchen extension. Charlie’s task was overwhelming him. He trembled with intense, first-day-of-school nerves he’d almost forgotten he knew how to feel, recriminating himself for his careless handling of her feelings, for being, in uni terms, a ‘bad bloke’.

  Did he love Sara? Charlie wondered. How did you know when you were in love? Love was strange like that. The second you began to wonder, more than idly, whether you were in love or not, the game was up. Doubt killed it – or perhaps made it painfully obvious that it had never been alive to begin with.

  Sock-muffled steps padded up the stairs. Charlie looked longingly at the first-floor window and dreamt of shimmying down the pipe, never to be seen again.

  ‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’ said Sara.

  Charlie’s thoughts raced in vital yet meaningless circles. To cover his confusion, he started for the light switch.

  ‘No, no, stay there.’ Sara climbed over her bed to turn on the fairy lights and Minnie Mouse clock lamp Charlie had bought her from Save The Children. Instinctively, he checked out her bum, then wished he hadn’t. It was like seeing her from the perspective of the strange men who would soon be chatting her up. ‘I think we should break up’: the words rattled round his skull. ‘I wish to break up’? ‘Let’s break up’? ‘Do you ever think, maybe, about us breaking up some time’?

  Over the Easter break, partly in order to mask his doubts, partly to deny them to himself, Charlie had attentively called Sara every day. Now he regretted it. He wished she already knew there was something wrong. He wished she would break up with him.

  The photos on Sara’s wall caught the light; bleached faces in uni clubs flashed in unison like a shoal of startled fish. Sara leaned over to give Charlie a kiss. ‘Are you all right? You look a bit wild-eyed.’

  It was the perfect opening, but all Charlie could do was stare mutely at the fairy lights. He got up and circled the room, watching his progress in the big mirror on the back of the door. The sight of himself was comforting – there he was, same as ever – yet also distracting. He needed to focus on the awful task at hand.

  ‘Do you need a paracetamol?’ Sara rummaged in her bedside drawer. She loved taking charge of people, not for herself, but for their own good. The combination of her desire to do things for others and his willingness to have things done for him was the central pillar of their relationship.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Taz was telling me’ – Sara carried on rummaging – ‘about this friend of his who’s set up a business delivering drinks to . . . Well, anyone, but students, really. You can call up any time between five p.m. and five a.m. and they’ll bring chilled drinks, snacks, skins, whatever you want to your door. Clever, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mm.’ For a long time now, Charlie had wanted to be an entrepreneur. He knew that to be an entrepreneur, you simply had to get on with it. You appointed yourself – you appointed
yourself boss. But somehow, in spite of Sara’s cheerleading, he hadn’t yet managed to translate his ideas into action. He had entrepreneur’s block.

  ‘They’ve already got like five hundred likes on Facebook.’ Sara was on the floor now, sweeping an arm under the bed.

  ‘I don’t need paracetamol,’ Charlie said, more snappily than he’d intended.

  ‘I just want to know where it is. I told Taz he should put us in touch with them. It’s quite similar to Social Tiger, don’t you think?’

  Social Tiger was Charlie’s best business idea so far. Like all the best ideas, it was beautifully simple. He would offer queue jumps and free drinks to students via Facebook, then he’d get bars and clubs to pay to promote their nights. It would be an instant success and grow with incredible speed, until it was acquired by Google for $2 billion. Game over. He just had to set it up first.

  When Charlie first had the idea, it had been incredible. It was like, those people who start successful businesses at uni, that was going to be him! It wasn’t the money (he didn’t care about money. As long as he could have nice clothes, good food and holidays three times a year, money wasn’t important to him). It was the idea that he’d found his thing, the thing he was going to do with his life, and it was awesome. It was like discovering the girl you loved, the one you wanted to spend all your time with, the one you loved so much you didn’t care what she looked like, and she was truly, objectively beautiful. You wouldn’t have cared if she wasn’t – but she was. He could have been an accountant – but he wasn’t, he was an entrepreneur.

  ‘I think we should break up’ – the words were on the tip of his tongue, when from the room next door came the start-up chord of Meredith’s computer. The walls in Sara’s house were toilet-paper thin. There was always the sound of Meredith typing or breathing, or the window-rattling thump of Fergus walking about on top of your head. Charlie squatted down to put on some music.

  What do you put on to break up with your girlfriend? Something sad? Something upbeat? Charlie had been watching a lot of old football documentaries on YouTube over the holidays. When Glenn Hoddle told Gazza he wasn’t going to France ’98, he remembered, he opted for Kenny G . . . This wasn’t helping. In a panic, Charlie pressed play on whatever was in there: Lily Allen. But the first track was ‘Smile’. That was about a break-up – he hammered at the eject button.

  ‘What’s wrong with Lily Allen?’ said Sara. ‘Or I know, put on that one with the whistling at the beginning.’

  ‘Peter, Bjorn and thingy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Things were so much easier when Sara told him what to do. It was terrible for him, he knew, but he relied so much on her advice. Like: should he get a haircut? Should he leave it? (The possibilities were endless.)

  ‘Leave it!’

  Charlie looked up, startled.

  Sara waved her hand under her chin. ‘You’ll make it worse.’ He’d been picking at an ingrown hair on his throat, just above his Adam’s apple. He hadn’t even noticed. For the last year or so Charlie had been getting ingrown hairs a lot, little bumps under the skin that had to be operated on with a safety pin before they went septic. Normally Sara performed the surgery – and even claimed to enjoy it. ‘Here.’ She advanced on him. ‘Let me.’

  If only he wasn’t so vain! Charlie was powerless in the face of her generosity. He was tilting his head back to let Sara get at his throat when all of a sudden he froze. ‘Stop.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘I don’t want you to!’ Rather than waiting for Sara’s reaction, Charlie turned away. Left hanging, she retreated in a hurt way.

  As Meredith revved her hairdryer, Charlie snapped on the album with an unsteady hand. The CD chittered, then settled, and the chipper drumbeat filled the room with inappropriate optimism.

  Charlie watched Sara until she sensed his agonised gaze.

  ‘Do you ever think,’ he began, ‘about maybe us breaking up . . . some time?’

  3

  Instinct

  Nietzsche said being confident was following your instinct: ‘One acts perfectly only when one acts instinctively.’ Exactly what Nietzsche meant by instinct is up for debate, but in essence, I think he’s totally right. That is how confidence feels. When we act confidently, we are acting out some impulse truer and deeper than rational thought.

  Nietzsche believed too much emphasis was placed on thought and self-control and not enough on instinct and self-expression. Like his great inspiration Darwin, he saw humans as part of nature. We are animals, he said, and the best thing we can do is to embrace our animal side. Being confident, for him, meant throwing aside the curse of self-consciousness and unleashing the potential beneath.

  By acting on instinct, Nietzsche didn’t mean going wild and letting it all hang out. As he put it: ‘Every artist knows how far from the feeling of letting oneself go his “most natural” state is, the free ordering, placing, regulating, shaping in moments of “inspiration”.’ Unlike Rousseau, Nietzsche didn’t believe in going back to some imagined Eden, where everyone would wander round naked and fruit would fall from the trees into our hands. The feeling was what mattered to him: he wanted us to feel natural. If we feel natural, he seems to say, we can combine the ingenuity of civilisation with the rightness and power of instinct.

  That’s Nietzsche; he liked to think big. I have more modest ambitions. When I say confidence, here’s what I mean: the ability to do what you want without your thoughts getting in the way.

  ‘I really loathe Nietzsche,’ said Ellie.

  Getting out helped her feel more like herself. She’d got dressed and everything, like a normal human being. Okay, so a normal human being wouldn’t be sporting this particular combination of beige tracksuit bottoms, suede boots with fake fur trim (Ellie’s only waterproof shoes, purchased, like most of her clothes, in a state of high stress at the Salvation Army) and Justin’s XXL Slayer Death hoodie under a trench coat, but still. It was a start. Outside was better than it looked. The rain was easing off and it wasn’t cold.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ said Rose, ‘how it’s always several degrees warmer outside than it is in the house?’

  Under the same umbrella, they picked their three-legged way past a puddle. A group of schoolgirls were coming out of the school gate, black-lined eyes shining with some operatic drama. They glared at Ellie and Rose as if they were embarrassed to be sharing the same pavement.

  ‘It’s like,’ said Ellie, ‘here’s this guy who barely spent ten minutes alone with a member of the opposite sex in his whole life—’

  ‘Imagine that.’

  ‘—and he’s like, “Women shouldn’t be trusted” and “Going to see a woman? Don’t forget your whip.” He genuinely believes there’s this small group of “higher men” who are the only reason for existence and that everyone else should devote their lives to helping them achieve greatness. And guess what, everyone in this group is exactly like him. You can really see why the Nazis thought he was the poster boy for the Third Reich. What a dick.’

  ‘You should say that in your dissertation. You should say, “Nietzsche is a dick.” Seriously. You should lay into him. Why not?’

  ‘You can’t. It’s not like that. With the major philosophers, you’re supposed to criticise them from the inside. You sort of trip them up by pointing out where they’ve contradicted themselves or—’

  ‘You should cuss him out, rap style. “Your momma’s so fat that she wore a blue dress and seagulls dived into it.” Uh!’ Rose started to rap. ‘Yo Nietzsche. You’ve got problems. Did yo daddy beat ya? Did yo momma eat ya? Don’t fuck with me or I’ll be on you like Jack Reacher.’

  Ellie laughed. This was why no one should feel sorry for Rose. Who could feel sorry for such an incredible bitch?

  ‘Yo Friedrich.’ On a roll, Rose started up some hip-hop hand waving. ‘Do you like free dick? Don’t make that face, Ellie. Do you like it up your arse? Do you . . .’ She grimaced. ‘You’ve put me off.’

 
‘Don’t look at me! Did Missy Elliot get where she is by listening to haters?’ As they skirted another puddle, Ellie could feel the wisps of an idea ghost into her head. Maybe I should criticise Nietzsche. I’ve been holding back. Maybe that’s what’s been inhibiting me. She tried to let the thought come to her, keeping very still, as if it were an animal she might scare away.

  ‘Neil!’ bellowed Rose, making her jump. ‘What are you doing?’

  The Shackleton Arms was a mock Tudor bungalow in one corner of a blistered concrete car park, hung around with rotting Carlsberg bunting. A sign warned: ‘Parking for customers only.’ Where the old name had been blacked out, someone had scratched ‘DRUNK’. It was thoroughly off-putting, but for Ellie and Rose, that was the appeal. It wasn’t a student venue. It didn’t have TV screens advertising ‘Your Letting Agent’ and ‘Your Student Nightclub’. No one was going to come in wearing a onesie or drop by for a hole on a round of pub golf.

  In the shelter of a maroon trade refuse bin, a drooping emo kid with a purple streak in his dyed black hair sipped gingerly on a cigarette.

  Rose marched towards him. ‘Neil! Are you smoking?’

  Neil flicked his cigarette into a drain below a ‘classy touch’, fake, hanging topiary ball. ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Oh, Neil.’ Rose put a barely-there arm round his shoulder. ‘What are we going to do with you? Ellie, you’ve met Neil right? Neil’s my main man, my partner in crime.’ She waggled devil horns. ‘Neil rawks, don’t you Neil?’

  Neil glared at his feet. ‘When I’m not working.’

  ‘Neil’s my project, aren’t you, Neil? He keeps me from going under when this job gets too depressing. So . . . most of the time.’ Rose shook herself, like, Let’s not get into that now. Inevitably, as soon as they had found this sanctuary, Rose had taken things too far, getting, losing and regaining a job working at the bar and embarking on fraught relationships with the owner, staff and regulars. ‘Ellie, you’re coming in for one, right? I’ll give you my staff drink.’