Confidence

by Rowland Manthorpe

  Nadine craned her neck. ‘How the fuck are we going to get up there?’

  Shielding her eyes, Ellie sized it up. ‘I s’pose someone could go up and lean out the window. Pretty far though.’ There was a doubtful pause. ‘I’m not saying I’ll do it, but someone could climb the lamp post.’ Their eyes travelled up, lingering on the uncomfortable distance between the tapering post and the faculty wall.

  ‘Well, I guess that’s it,’ said Maria with some relief, as she checked the time on her phone.

  ‘Could throw something at it.’ Nadine twisted one of her rings around her finger. ‘Bit mad though. We’re trying to rebrand as less ranty.’

  ‘Are we?’ Ellie laughed.

  Nadine winked at Ellie. ‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.’

  ‘Look, I might have to go.’ Maria drew back, holding out the remaining printouts, her face suddenly sickly and twisted as a used tissue. ‘I made this timetable, you see. If I don’t stick to the timetable, I get a bit—’

  ‘Stop talking.’ Ellie grabbed the paper. ‘You’re stressing me out.’

  ‘I’m actually stressing myself out. It’s just hit me now.’ Maria shivered. ‘I’ve got to go. Good luck, okay. Don’t die. We don’t want any Emily Davisons here.’

  ‘Thanks for the tip.’

  Maria shuffled off, leaving Ellie and Nadine staring up. One of the people working at the window desks drew her blind.

  ‘Maybe we should leave this one.’ Ellie scanned left and right. Being this close to the philosophy department felt dangerous, as if she were revisiting a crime scene.

  ‘So it’s you.’

  With a jump, they turned round. A tall guy with a shaggy, dark-blonde Mohican was standing right behind them.

  ‘“Women have pubes”. Cool.’ He had a rangy, lean look. In his roughly cut off trousers and dirty vest, he might have spent the last few nights on the side of a motorway or living in a forest.

  ‘Oh.’ Ellie scratched her head. ‘Thanks.’

  He fixed his hooded brown eyes on her. ‘I loved the mad online shit.’

  ‘Ah, right,’ she smiled. ‘We’re trying to sound a bit less ranty now.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, apparently disappointed. ‘Why?’

  Ellie looked at Nadine, who was eyeing them both with a mischievous squint. ‘So people don’t think we’re mad . . . I s’pose,’ she trailed off.

  ‘I’m anti-sanitisation. Why be reasonable?’ He put his hands in his pockets, all elbows and shoulders and wiry limbs. ‘I’m Oscar, by the way.’

  Ellie shook her gaze from the freckles on Oscar’s nose. ‘Ellie.’

  Nadine put her hands on her hips. ‘How’s your climbing, Oscar? ’Cos mine’s not all that and we need someone to vandalise this abomination.’ She pointed up at the poster.

  Oscar gave a thin-lipped smile. ‘Sounds dangerous.’

  ‘Chivalry’s not dead.’ Ellie swung a stagey punch. ‘It’s just a lot less rewarding.’

  ‘Someone should give it the final kick-in.’ Oscar held out a hand. ‘Let’s see.’ He took the sheets of paper and scanned them over.

  Ellie felt strangely shy watching him read their slogans – ‘AT UNI I LEARNED MY BODY WAS MY ONLY ASSET’, ‘WOMEN HAVE PUBES’ and ‘EDUCATION NOT OBJECTIFICATION’. Maybe they didn’t capture it at all? Each one had #unisexism at the bottom, a testimony to Nadine’s Easter work experience at the ad agency. (‘You need somewhere for people to go, otherwise what’s the point? How can you even measure it?’) For a second, Ellie wanted to grab them and run away. She barely resisted the temptation to cover her eyes.

  ‘All right,’ nodded Oscar. ‘May as well do them all.’

  Ellie felt a crashing relief. With a final eyebrow-lift at Ellie’s expression, Nadine ran upstairs to hand the paper and glue from the window. Ellie remained as lookout, not quite sure what to say now she was alone with Oscar. A couple of guys passed by, heading for the car park.

  ‘Yeah, but mate, mate,’ one was saying, ‘the grad scheme at Goldy’s stopped accepting applications ages ago.’

  Ellie looked at Oscar and smiled awkwardly. ‘You got yours in, right?’

  ‘Fuck, missed it.’ Oscar sucked air through his teeth. ‘But I did send them a video of myself masturbating. Fingers crossed they might hire me anyway.’

  With the coast clear, Oscar leaned his back against the lamp post and started to walk his feet inch by inch up one of the building’s concrete legs, one spidery hand gripping the metal above his head. His vest slipped off his slender shoulder and dropped down his arm. Blocking the sun from her eyes, Ellie took in his gradual, long-limbed ascent: carefully balanced, resting momentarily on the ball of each foot as if dancing, he had an easy concentration on his weathered face, his eyes glancing up every few seconds in a slow, syncopated rhythm.

  The sudden appearance of Dr Longstaff between the concrete pillars made Ellie gasp with shock.

  ‘Oh, hi, Ellie,’ called her supervisor, both arms hugging a tower of essays. A wisp of hair flew into her mouth and she tried to blow it out as she passed by. ‘Everything all right? Writing going well?’

  No, Ellie thought, as she nodded fervently.

  8

  Style Your Character

  Nietzsche did give one piece of advice to people trying to become themselves. To succeed in this project, he said, we have to reconcile ourselves with our past. True confidence, for Nietzsche, was being able to look back and say, ‘I’d do it all again.’

  Nietzsche called this way of thinking ‘amor fati’, love of fate. It’s basically ‘no regrets’ on a grand scale, not just ‘oh well, never mind,’ but ‘thank goodness this happened to me, because if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.’ As Nietzsche described it: ‘Now something you held as true or once loved strikes you as an error . . . But perhaps that error was necessary for you then, when you were another person.’ One must, he wrote, be like those ‘masters of musical improvisation’ who can, with a nimble flick of the fingers, give each accident ‘a beautiful meaning and soul’.

  Nietzsche stayed on at university to do a PhD, but he was such a brilliant student that the University of Basel offered him a professorship based on the recommendation of his supervisor, and he was awarded his doctorate without having to complete his thesis. It was 1869; he was twenty-four. ‘Why on earth,’ he wrote later, ‘does anyone become a university professor at twenty-four?’ He had been at school since the age of six and he wanted to see the world and pursue his philosophical interests. His plan was to take a year out and go to Paris, the East London of the nineteenth century, to sample ‘the divine can-can and the green absinthe’. But he needed the money – his father had died when he was six and his mother lived off her widow’s pension – and he was ambitious and proud of his achievement. He left university lamenting the end of ‘golden days of gloriously free activity’. ‘Now,’ he complained about his new job, ‘I must be a philistine!’

  His stint as an academic was one of the accidents of Nietzsche’s life. Like everyone, he had his fair share: poor health, his father’s early death, loneliness and lack of success as a writer. Taken in isolation, each of these experiences might seem senseless or regrettable. By seeing them as part of ‘an artistic plan’, Nietzsche was able to recognise the indispensable role each one played in forming the whole. Looking back in his philosophical autobiography Ecce Homo, he could declare, in all sincerity: ‘I do not have the slightest wish that anything should be different to the way it is.’

  The same holistic approach could also be applied to the good and bad parts of our personalities. Like good and bad experiences, isolated strengths and weaknesses were much less important than the overall character they produced. The secret to becoming yourself was not to try and remove the weaknesses, but to fit them into the overall plan, pulling all the different parts together ‘until everything appears artistic and rational, and even the weaknesses enchant the eye’.

  Nietzsche called this process ‘�
��giving style” to one’s character’. Once again, he successfully forecast the shape of the modern world. Now, everyone has their own narrative, styled, crafted and curated, a constantly updated story of self. Nietzsche wrote: ‘whether the taste is good or bad is less important than people think – enough that it’s one taste!’ Like a CV: it’s not the story, but it’s a story, and as long as you believe it, that’s really all that matters.

  Taz had his office in the Caffè Nero in the centre of town. In exam term, the competition for spaces was as bad here as it was in the library – he must have arrived at opening time, Charlie thought, to get the prized corner table. Every year, as the weeks of revision passed, the twitchy Nero regulars formed a disparate crew that managed to overcome ordinary social barriers. Revision was like that: you saw the same people day in, day out; you shared their boredom, hysteria, despair. The tedium and fear wore people down and eventually broke them – you couldn’t help forming connections. That was how Charlie had first got to know Taz. He had revised here in first year, or more accurately, he had observed Rachel revising (Rachel was his hopeless first-year crush who had a boyfriend at Warwick, but still came to Charlie’s room three times a week to watch films and platonically sleep over – thank God he’d finally cut that shit) and tried to win her over with a painstaking selection of YouTube videos. He’d spent somewhere in the region of £400 on grande lattes that semester.

  In the long queue downstairs, the boy in front of Charlie was standing in stripy socks, musing over the pastries. As Charlie dug out his credit card, he positioned himself to block the view from the far corner. On the way in, he had clocked Sasha sprawled in one of the armchairs. Charlie wondered what Lucas would do in this situation – perhaps walk past without seeing her on the way out, just to remind her he existed and wasn’t thinking about her. Or more likely, head straight over and make some joke about how he was only talking to her because he wanted to have sex with her. And by some perverse Lucas-logic, it would work.

  Somehow, Charlie reflected, Lucas had managed to get it completely right – he’d gained trust by hiding his bad behaviour in plain sight. Meanwhile, Charlie had been working with a completely different brand strategy: ‘Good Bloke’. Being a Good Bloke wasn’t easy – it involved gradually building credit through small acts of decency, and recommendations from other users in the community. The acts couldn’t be too ostentatious; on the other hand, you didn’t want to go hiding your light under a bushel. Preventing a fight was classic. Helping some girl who had puked all over herself outside Rehab. Giving up your Sunday to help a girl move house.

  The ideal result was that some unobtrusive, selfless favour you’d done came up in conversation between two fit girls and a guy. One of the fit girls would share your good deed and the guy would say, ‘Yeah, he’s a good bloke.’ For some reason, Charlie had observed, girls tended to believe the statement more readily when it came from a guy, perhaps because it was clear that he wasn’t the victim of a charm campaign designed to trick him into sex. But it was also crucial to have that endorsement from the other girl (in the ideal scenario, she would then say, ‘He’s fit as well’), because it gave her peers permission to fancy you. That was how you built trust in the brand and added value to your product. (Obviously, you had to be reasonably good-looking for this to work. Otherwise you were pursuing a different strategy again: either overcoming your deficiency by being a superhumanly good bloke, an ‘Incredibly Lovely Guy’, or alternatively becoming the kind of fucked-up, hilarious dickhead girls described as ‘Ugly But’.) The Good-Looking Good Bloke theory was that trust would eventually come good in the form of casual sex with hot girls who were also nice people. Yes, it would be a long road, but creating a global brand wasn’t easy (did you see Zuckerberg complaining?) and you could comfort yourself through the lonely nights with the fact that it was also making you a better person and improving the world.

  Of course what had actually happened to Charlie was that he had got a girlfriend, because – as Lucas told him repeatedly – he was asking for it.

  Well, nobody could accuse Charlie of not adapting to his environment. The board had instituted a major strategic shake-up. Lucas had been promoted to Best Friend, the position of Girlfriend had been made redundant, and Taz had shot from distant acquaintance to Career Accelerator.

  When Charlie got back, Taz was finishing an email. ‘Myup, send.’ He tapped his laptop decisively. ‘Sorry about that. I’m having this correspondence—’

  ‘Nice beard,’ interrupted Charlie. ‘Very Craig David.’

  Taz lifted a hand towards his jawline, stroking the fluffy crawl of hair he’d cultivated over the Easter break. Taz was deeply unstylish, not in the painful way of a true nerd, but in the manner of someone whose first-generation mum was still buying his clothes well into his teens. It wasn’t what he wore exactly – Yale hoodie, jeans, loafers – it was how clean and snugly fitting it all was.

  Seeing Taz’s flicker of a frown, Charlie instantly regretted needling him. Taz wasn’t a lad, he wasn’t expecting abusive banter as a matter of course. Charlie was a little keyed-up, he realised – maybe it was because Taz was actually more ‘Sara’s friend’ than his. Sara had worked for him, marketing a series of club nights he ran, a solid business idea, which (Charlie had noted at the time) had the happy side effect of Taz employing a small army of fit girls. ‘Sorry, you were saying. Correspondence.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Taz shook his head wearily. ‘The university wrote to me in February saying I was going to fail my course unless I spent more time on it. So I wrote back saying, “Look, this is ridiculous. I haven’t been wasting my time. I’ve done more for this university than ten people who contribute nothing and leave with bog-standard two:ones. Can’t I get credit for one of the societies I’ve set up?” So they wrote back saying, “No way,” and I was like, “Look, you’re alienating someone who’s potentially a major future donor here. Can’t we come to some arrangement?” Long story short: we can’t. Which is crazy, but now I’m motivated to see it as a challenge: can I do enough in my final four courses to scrape a two:one?’

  ‘Oh.’ Charlie never failed to be amazed by Taz’s imperial sense of self-worth. This was the real reason, he remembered, why he needled him: to establish some sense of equality. ‘So do you still want to—’

  Taz flicked the worry away. ‘Of course. That’s just the uni game. Business is real life. So. How can I help you?’

  ‘Well.’ Charlie cleared himself a bit of space. ‘I hope we can help each other. I’ve got this business idea that I think—’

  ‘Have you got a business plan?’

  ‘No. Not yet. That’s what—’

  ‘You should have come to Entrepreneurs’ Night last week. Brian Miller gave a great talk on business plans.’ Taz slipped back in his chair, evidently downgrading this meeting from Important to Low-Priority. ‘Anyway, carry on.’

  Charlie had prepared for this meeting using a technique he had christened ‘anti-preparation’. As the name suggested, anti-preparation explicitly banned looking through notes or writing new ones. Such efforts were a) pointless, because what can you find out in the twenty minutes you’ve left yourself, and b) a positive drawback, because by preparing, you admitted you cared. That admission was the thing that made you nervous – and nerves were what made you perform badly.

  Avoiding that pitfall, anti-preparation focused on getting mentally ready: long showers, the right clothes, intentionally running late to give yourself no time for reflection. It was this technique that had secured Charlie his AAB at A-Level (the rogue B – Biology, of all things – had almost scuppered his university entrance). Of course, at school he’d had all those lessons, a kind of deep leave-it-to-soak form of preparation. But hadn’t he spent hours and hours discussing Social Tiger with Sara? Only, now, put on the spot, he felt an unexpected thrill, as if an invisible hand had strummed a chord right down his body. ‘So, um, it’s—’

  ‘Start with the market. What market is it serving?�
�

  The market was students – this, Charlie felt, was his central insight. He was amazed at how few people saw it. When he’d asked his dad why he didn’t sell chocolates to students, he said, ‘Students don’t have jobs, Charlie. In business, I find, it’s best to go for people with money.’ (Charlie’s parents had a chocolate company. Yes, they made and sold chocolates, and with malice aforethought they’d named him Charlie. Lucky for them he was so robust.) Students were just as bad. They might recognise their marketability, in a dull, cynical way – as Alistair said about their house, ‘Obviously we’re paying the “unlucky, you’re students and you don’t have a choice” premium’ – but they failed to see the implications of that. Here was a captive audience, free from financial commitments, with nothing to do but spend. And who knew that market better than Charlie and Taz – students themselves, with first-hand experience? Somewhere in his bookmarks folder, Charlie had some stats: he couldn’t remember them right now, so he made them up. ‘The student market is worth something like eight billion.’

  Taz nodded. ‘And they’re most likely high earners later. Huge opportunity for retailers and service providers to get them now and keep them for life.’

  ‘Lots of people are in this space.’ Charlie was back on track. He was even picking up the lingo. ‘Like, the other day, I was headhunted by this guy looking for student brand ambassadors.’ He meant Arthur. This was another creative elaboration, but it was a constructive lie – as well as sounding vaguely impressive, it might encourage Charlie to reply to Arthur’s officious follow-up, sent within minutes of meeting. ‘But there’s no one I know doing exactly this thing.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘We offer discounts and queue jumps to students by interesting companies in the potential of the student market. Then we sell advertising space on the website and eventually we collect user data and sell that too.’

  Taz chewed the inside of his lip in silence. ‘There must be other people doing it.’