Confidence

by Rowland Manthorpe

  ‘Before you do—’ Justin held up a hand to stop Ellie in her tracks. ‘I was wondering.’ He met her eye. ‘If you’d like to move in here. With me.’

  ‘Orhm!’ Ellie straightened up, preventing a bit of toast from escaping her mouth. On autopilot, she pulled off her Superman T-shirt and scouted round for a towel, before realising that the conversation wasn’t over. Some sort of response was required. She felt . . . she couldn’t work out what she felt. It was as if she’d been given an unexpected compliment by somebody she didn’t know that well. It was pleasant, warming, nice, but she wasn’t sure she actually agreed with it. She thought the person was probably wrong about her. She swallowed. ‘Oh, right.’

  Justin’s eyes were trained on her face. There was a silence that lasted a little too long, before he stood up and said, ‘Of course, you should think about it. It’s a lot to decide all at once.’

  ‘Yeah, exactly, it’s . . .’ Ellie could feel her brain shutting down: one by one, lights were turning off, occupants filing out, whole floors were closing, alarm codes being punched in. Knowing how much Justin would hate her silence, she tried to keep talking, to wedge a door open with words. ‘The thing is, it’s a big . . . I don’t really know what I’m doing yet, do you know what I mean? Not us, I mean, more myself. I don’t know what I’ll end up . . . even what I want to try— or where, so I don’t want to say—’

  ‘It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me now.’ Justin drew the curtain roughly. A few brass pins skittered down. ‘I’m going to put up a rail,’ he muttered.

  Ellie took a step towards him, still holding her T-shirt. ‘Sorry, I’m just trying to explain why I’m hesitating, because it’s a great idea. I just—’

  ‘I get it. Don’t worry. It’s all right.’ Justin started picking up clothes and laying them over the back of his desk chair.

  Ellie had a strong desire to go somewhere she could think, but to leave now would seem too much like a rejection. With a dim sense of failure, she returned to the bed and finished her eggs. A couple of minutes of silence passed as she bit and chewed and ruminated on exactly how and why she was cocking this up. Justin assembled a pile of dirty clothes next to the bin, then came to stand over his desk, shifting his laptop and a couple of used plates aside in order to stare at the piles of notes beneath.

  ‘I suppose . . .’ A look of miserable resignation settled on Justin’s face. ‘Maybe we should start to think about . . . the F-word.’

  They looked at one another.

  ‘Now you’ve done it. A SWAT team is going to come in here and take you out any second now,’ said Ellie, glumly. At the sight of his wretched expression, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. ‘Before they do, I want to tell you I love you and it is a great idea and I’ll think about it.’ She got up, padded over in her pants, and held Justin’s cheeks, pulling his face down to kiss him.

  ‘Thanks.’ Justin kissed her nose and they hugged. The sun had crept round the drooping curtain.

  ‘I don’t think I’m ready to resume life.’ She shook her head. ‘Honestly, I’m not sure I can cope with it. I’m made of the wrong stuff.’

  ‘Lucky for you, it’s not life you’re resuming.’ Justin brushed her greasy fringe to the side. ‘It’s revision – whole other thing.’

  6

  How to Get It

  Nietzsche’s philosophy was meant to be a guide to action, but it is hard to see how anyone would go about putting his advice into practice. Either it was extremely specific (‘Tea is very detrimental and will sicken you for the whole day, if it’s just a touch too weak’) or so general as to be completely inapplicable. ‘World affirmation’ is not really the sort of thing you just can go off and do, and you only have to try telling someone to ‘Say “Yes” to life’ once to see how miserable that makes them. In any case, if the most important thing is to follow our own desires and no one else’s, why should we listen to Nietzsche anyway?

  There is a wealth of advice on how to become confident – some of it with a venerable philosophical history – but it all boils down to two basic approaches.

  First, competence – that is, being good at things. The basic theory here: you become confident by gaining expertise. From a rational perspective, this makes perfect sense. You’re good at something, so you feel good about yourself; the better you do, the better you will feel.

  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Confidence is anti-meritocratic: it’s what gets blaggers through on charm alone, while other people who are in many ways more expert struggle to achieve the same success, because they lack that spark of inspiration. If anything, being an expert can actually get in the way of confidence. You know too much; you’re heavy, not light-footed, and if confidence is about anything, it is nimbleness and flexibility.

  Nietzsche dismissed the competence approach out of hand. ‘It is not works, but faith, that is decisive here,’ he wrote. It is not what you do, but how you do it – or even, as Nietzsche claimed, who you are.

  The second approach to gaining confidence is practice, in other words the idea that you can learn confidence as a skill. The most effective version of this method is summed up in a phrase that has become a battle cry for self-help books: ‘Fake it till you make it.’ At times, Nietzsche did appear to endorse this tactic, which derives from Aristotle’s discussion of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics. ‘One must learn to love,’ Nietzsche wrote. ‘He who loves himself will also have learned it in this way.’ Yet this technique never seemed to ignite his enthusiasm. Aside from a few brief mentions, he rarely returned it, and never with his usual vigour.

  So what did Nietzsche suggest instead?

  Rather than faking it, Nietzsche was more concerned with making it, as truly and fully as was humanly possible. Faking it, he says, is a normal part of growing up, one that can be helpful as a way of developing confidence. But when you fake it, when you pretend with your whole self, you have to be pretending to be someone you are. Like love: you have to work at it, but it has to be right, or all the work in the world will make no difference.

  It’s an irritating truth, but the thing about confidence is that there is no Step One, no easy way to start going after it. You begin, feeling awful, and you get absolutely nowhere, but you keep at it, always on the verge of giving up – and only after some time has passed do you realise that, actually, you don’t feel as bad as you once did. Somehow, something has changed, and by the time you notice, it has already happened, like a sunrise or a room growing warm.

  In a pub quiz, Charlie wasn’t ‘the knowledge’. He wasn’t the go-to guy for film (Ben) or geography (Ben) or, if he was honest, very much at all. So he studied Politics. That didn’t mean he knew what Nancy Astor was famous for or the name of the second President of the United States. Even football, his one truly specialist subject if you measured by time spent watching, was better handled by Alistair. All right, Charlie wasn’t Lucas, who had managed to pick up literally nothing in his twenty years of life (quote: ‘Is Moscow a Muslim country?’), but he wasn’t that far off. And this lack of specialism – this knowing fuck all about fuck all – sometimes played on his mind, unsettling his hopes for the future. What could he actually do?

  But last night, as Charlie had helped come up with the team name and provide the crucial banter that oiled the wheels of team DENSA, he had begun to wonder whether knowledge was really that important. After all, somebody needed to bring the best out of everyone with the right mixture of praise and mockery. And now that everything could be Googled, wasn’t that more useful than being able to name five David Bowie albums from memory? It had even come up in the quiz. ‘Who invented the first Apple computer?’ Not Steve Jobs, who according to Alistair didn’t even know how to write code. Jobs wasn’t the inventor, he was the strategist, the man who saw opportunities and knew which way to head. And now Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs and that other guy was a trick question in a pub quiz.

  Charlie had managed to drag Alistair to the pub, having spotted a momen
tary weakness in his Bran Flakes and revision routine. For the first hour Alistair had sat there with a guilty, shiftless look, as if the Revision Goddess were measuring his intake on her infallible golden scales. But before long, Alistair’s cheeks had started to burn with deep spots of red, and he’d bought two rounds in a row with an air of slightly unhinged abandon. After that it had been back to Number 69 (the ladz’ place, chosen because number 69 was banter) for a few hands of cards, some tongue-coating red wine, and the tin of pilchards in tomato sauce that was DENSA’s prize for a highly respectable fourth place. By the time Charlie dragged himself away, it was past 2 a.m. It was only as he left that he remembered.

  ‘Oh shit. I’ve got a group presentation on New Labour’s immigration policy tomorrow – I mean, today.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Lucas clapped his shoulder. ‘You’ll be in the perfect state. An empty mind is a clear mind.’

  ‘Group presentation’: a phrase for the process whereby everybody works separately and meets an hour beforehand to whack it together. After everyone arrived five minutes late, the next ten minutes had been spent trying to find a place to work. Now, at T minus 45, on the floor outside the library meeting room that no one had booked, Melanie Fisher had a pinched, nervous-verging-on-tearful look, and Sasha (Fit Sasha rather than Sasha Joyce) was rolling her eyes at every remark, as if she’d emptied the tank simply by turning up and not throttling somebody.

  ‘In some ways you could see New Labour’s immigration policy as a continuation of Conservative policy from the previous government,’ Andrew Webster droned on. ‘But not everyone agrees on that. I mean, thingy said . . . hold on, I’ve got it somewhere . . .’ He lifted sheets of notes and scoured around. ‘Um . . . You know the one that was on the reading list?’

  ‘I was doing the conclusion,’ Sasha announced into the silence. Kneeling on the floor, she propped herself up on her right arm, blue-black hair draped across one big, turquoise-rimmed eye like a Glaswegian Princess Jasmine. ‘I think we should say that New Labour immigration policy was a failure. That’s what everyone says. Even them.’

  ‘But what kind of failure?’ Melanie Fisher practically choked in exasperation. ‘Why a failure? Who thought it was a failure? On what terms?’

  Unlike Melanie, Charlie felt quite calm. Lucas had been right – sometimes a hangover was a gift. Muffled throbs in the head, burning behind the eyes, stomach twinges – it gave the mind something to worry about, distracting it just enough to allow thought to flow clearly. ‘Who says it was a success?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s some good figures on that in this piece,’ mumbled Andrew, lifting the same sheets of paper, as though the right pattern of paper-lifting might magically reveal the answer.

  ‘We should start again from the beginning,’ said Melanie. ‘It doesn’t make sense to do it this way. How can you write the conclusion when you don’t know anything about the arguments? How is your evidence going to point to something if you don’t know what it’s pointing to? Christ.’ She held her hands to her temples, shielding her eyes from the rest of the group. ‘Why is this stupid presentation now? It’s crazy having it when we’re meant to be revising for other modules.’

  Sasha was almost totally reclined by now. Her arm gave way beneath her. ‘Helpful,’ she muttered into the carpet.

  ‘Here!’ Andrew held up a photocopy. ‘Will Somerville says “there is scant evidence that immigrants negatively affect native wages and unemployment levels or strain public resources, yet nearly half the population believe—” Oh, shit, no, that’s for another section. Sorry.’ He kept shaking his head long after it was necessary.

  ‘Okay, let’s not panic.’ Charlie held up his hands. ‘What about if we take it back a bit? Sasha, it sounded like you had a strong conclusion.’

  Sasha raised a dubious eyebrow at him. Charlie had always fancied her, and now he was single he had the faint sense that he ought to do something about it – but at the same time, he knew his place. She was the kind of girl he’d get stuck having coffee with and ‘being there’ for while she had troubles with real men. Another time this thought might have got him down, but today it was an idle reflection. Once again, his hangover lent a thick, fuzzy layer of insulation to proceedings – his brain was like a Scandinavian holiday home.

  ‘Melanie, you’re right,’ Charlie continued, giving everyone their due. ‘The evidence needs to lead there. Andrew, it sounds like you’ve got a lot of the detail down.’ Lying wasn’t lying when it might become true. ‘So maybe we should decide, what’s our story?’

  ‘What do you have, Charlie?’ asked Sasha.

  Charlie thought for a second. ‘Everyone says it’s a failure, right?’

  ‘Like this presentation,’ groaned Andrew.

  ‘No, no, no! We’re almost there. How long do we have? Thirty-five minutes – loads of time. Look, if everyone says it’s a failure, maybe we should say it’s a success. No. We should dispute the premise of the question. We should say—’

  ‘But what about Sasha’s conclusion?’ interrupted Melanie. ‘We can’t just throw that away.’

  Melanie, Charlie decided, was the group’s Gordon Brown: furiously conscientious. ‘You’re right. We could turn that into the introduction. “New Labour immigration policy is generally regarded as a failure. For example” – what’s his name? – “Somerville says”. Sasha? Can you do that?’

  Sasha looked amused. ‘Then where will we go after that?’

  ‘I could run through the history of the policy,’ offered Andrew.

  ‘Great, yeah! “This is what they’ve done, this is where we’ve got to.” If we keep it simple, that’ll take up a couple of minutes.’

  Andrew burrowed into his notes. ‘I think I’ve got a summary in here.’

  ‘We can’t just “keep it simple”,’ said Melanie. ‘This is a massively complex topic. We have to acknowledge that.’

  ‘Yes.’ Charlie responded to the constructive comment Melanie had surely intended. ‘That can be our third section. The “This is a very complex problem with lots of competing interpretations” bit. You know, the montage section.’

  ‘Like in The Lion King where he grows up with Pumbaa and Timone,’ Sasha smirked.

  Melanie glared at her. ‘And then?’

  ‘I will conclude,’ said Charlie. ‘With a conclusion I will think of in the next . . . thirty minutes. Could be anything. But, I promise you all, it will be all right.’

  And to Charlie’s amazement, their presentation went off brilliantly. All right, so it was a bit sketchy in places – Andrew’s idea of keeping things simple was to spend two minutes on the previous administration’s legislation and then have half a minute left for the topic they were actually presenting on – but Melanie wrestled it back on course. His own conclusion was a minor masterpiece of smoke and mirrors. In the absence of knowledge, he’d gone for force, drawing the comment, ‘Well argued,’ from Dr Sanderson. That was good enough for him. If this presentation was 10 per cent of his overall mark, he needed the 6.3 per cent he would get for talking in English on something like the right topic. There wasn’t anything in any of the other presentations that made him think he wasn’t worthy of that.

  ‘Great job.’ He caught up with Sasha and Andrew in the corridor. ‘And now we never have to do that again.’

  ‘Yeah, cheers, Charlie.’ Andrew was pink with relief.

  ‘Yeah.’ Sasha hitched her bag. ‘Thanks for barging in and rearranging the presentation even though you hadn’t done any work yourself.’

  ‘Any time.’ Charlie smiled back at her. ‘Your intro was actually the best bit.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  Charlie wondered if this counted as flirting. Years ago, he remembered, flirting was one of those things he used to spend a lot of time worrying about. He’d read blog posts about eye contact and squeezing upper arms, which in his experience made you come off like a creepy boss. Maybe all there was to flirting was being friendly, enthusiastic, nice . . . It was a cu
rious thought. He wished he could travel back in time and share this insight with his fourteen-year-old self.

  ‘See you both next week?’ Andrew stepped back to let the next group by. ‘Last seminar.’

  ‘Oh yeah. You’re coming, right?’ Charlie asked Sasha.

  She shrugged: I guess so. Her shrug vocabulary was wider than Charlie’s verbal one.

  ‘Well, I’ll see you there. If not before.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Her friend was calling her. ‘Anyway. See you whenever.’

  ‘You look better than I thought!’ Nadine greeted Ellie. Sprawling on the public art sculpture in the sun, Nadine looked like a bleary mosaic, all plastic jewellery and orange lips and stacks of afro hair.

  ‘I’m going to wring the compliment out of that statement,’ Ellie smiled back. ‘Thanks very much.’

  Nadine propped herself up, cocked her head to one side, and took in Ellie’s puffy face, wet hair and trailing jeans. ‘Rose called me up, said you’re in a state. Like, you’re gonna set yourself on fire smoking under the duvet. Then you went AWOL. She thought you were dead.’

  ‘Rose.’ Ellie rolled her eyes as she hauled Nadine up. Rose (Ellie strongly suspected) felt intimidated by her uni mates and liked to demonstrate the closeness of their friendship by calling Nadine up and making Ellie sound insane.

  ‘’S’it bad, then?’ asked Nadine, cheerfully. ‘One to ten.’

  ‘One to ten, how bad?’ They swung open the gleaming doors of the multiplex. ‘What are we seeing by the way?’

  ‘Everything,’ declared Nadine. ‘And we’re talking through all of them. And you’re telling me what’s going on.’

  Nadine had been on Ellie’s Ancient Philosophy module in semester one of the second year. They didn’t speak. Ellie always did that when she really liked a girl. She put a lot of energy into wishing uni girls were better, and was always complaining about their hair-straightening, pashmina-wearing ways. When she met one that was cool but still nice, funny without being mean, hot without being vain, it was off-the-scale intimidating.