‘Maybe at other unis. But no one’s cracked it so far, or we would have heard of them.’
‘Of course, if it’s a large market like this one, you don’t need to be the first to do it.’ Taz became suddenly animated. ‘There was Pret, then there was Eat. Caffè Nero, then Costa – or the other way round.’
‘Steve Jobs couldn’t even code. He just took the ideas and—’ Charlie twisted an invisible Rubik’s Cube between his hands.
‘Of course, I’m not into that sort of thing. Selling people things they don’t need.’
‘Oh, no, me neither,’ agreed Charlie, who up to that point had never considered the question.
‘A lot of people have that idea about me. After that arbitrage with the tickets to Rehab.’ Taz’s early forays into uni entrepreneurialism had been pretty controversial. In his first term, Taz realised that people in the endless queue for Rehab Wednesday would pay far more than the £7 cover price to get in before it became one-in-one-out around 10 p.m. So he went early, bought lots of tickets in advance, and sold them for a sizeable profit. After a few of weeks of this, people were up in arms. The Badger included Taz in their wall of shame two weeks in a row, and the hockey boys stole his clothes from the dryer room and tried to auction them off on the lawn in front of the Walworth building. The level of vitriol had discouraged other students from similar interventions. But personally, Charlie didn’t care. So maybe it was a bit crude, a bit rough and ready, but it showed serious initiative – the guy was providing a service. Taz pressed his palms together and gave Charlie an earnest look. ‘I’m interested in disruptive innovations that will really overturn an industry.’
‘Me too.’ Charlie met his sincerity. ‘As I see it, this is about opening up the market. Students are poorly served at the moment. There’s so much expensive crap that only sells because it’s not being challenged.’
‘Mm. Are you going to do this on Facebook, because that can be tricky.’
‘Well, I’m looking for your opinion on this.’ Charlie wasn’t above massaging Taz’s self-importance. ‘Either we use Facebook and start lean, or we set up a website—’
‘With what money?’
‘Here, do you mind if . . . ?’ Charlie leaned across and opened a new tab to the seed-fund scheme. ‘With this. It’s a student-only competition, I reckon we’d stand a great chance. All we need is a business plan . . . CVs, branding design, market research, etc.—’
‘Yeah, I know the guys who set this up.’ Taz looked it over.
Leaning back, Charlie sipped his latte, trying not to crowd or look too eager. Rather than pressure Taz, he wanted to sneak up on the question of partnership, avoiding the possibility of a refusal.
Taz turned to him, scratching his beard. ‘Listen, they won’t go for you without a tech guy attached. Even if you start on Facebook, you’re going to need a website soon, and one with additional functionality stored up for the future.’
A flash of inspiration hit Charlie. ‘My housemate can code and I’ve broached it with him already,’ he lied. The first part was true; the second could surely become so. ‘Alistair Hayes? He built a website last year for his sister, a photographer – looks awesome.’ Charlie reached for the keys again and brought up the site, fronted by a high-quality image of puffins nesting on a cliff. His heart beat a little faster. There was no way Alistair would want to make a website before finals – squeezing in meals seemed to be enough of a burden on his time – but maybe, possibly, if Charlie begged and pleaded and guilt-tripped and bribed, Alistair would consider mocking up a page, just for branding purposes. Charlie made a mental note to take Alistair a muffin.
As Taz broke off to reply to a text, a sense of momentum began to build in Charlie. The website, the brand values . . . it was all just detail. Social Tiger had been part of his imagined world for years: he’d pictured it, he knew it so intimately; everything was bound to fall into place.
Charlie headed out with a sketched-out business plan, a coffee-induced headache, and a lemon and poppyseed bribe to take away. Armed thus, almost on impulse, he stopped by Sasha’s table. Pippa Lattimer was perched on the arm of the leather chair, wearing what looked like pyjama bottoms and a vest, brushing her cheek with the end of a long plait and staring at a photocopied article. Pippa was unbelievably dry, but her presence gave him the excuse he needed to keep it brief. ‘Hey.’
‘Hey.’ Sasha looked up from her laptop without a hint of a smile. ‘Are you taking your muffin for a walk?’
‘It’s a present for Alistair. I’m concerned he’s crash dieting.’ Charlie gave a wistful shrug. ‘Shame, cause he’s beautiful just as he is.’
A one-sided, feline smirk flashed across Sasha’s face. ‘I didn’t know you were working here.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t revising.’ Charlie opened the conversation out to Pippa, who was busy adjusting her hairband. It occurred to Charlie that it might not be a good idea to tell them about Social Tiger. After all, he and Taz hadn’t won the scheme yet. But at this moment, with sugar and caffeine coursing through his veins, Charlie didn’t care – it didn’t matter if the business ultimately succeeded; all that counted was holding on to the feeling he had right now, this expansive sense of possibility.
‘Picking on Shannon like that is just mean,’ Becky Hamilton-Simm commented. Shannon Bond, it turned out, was the name of the model in the Safer Sex Ball posters. She was a really nice second-year Engineer who – according to Becky – was being victimised by an army of jealous bitches for being exceptionally good-looking.
Jane Thomas liked Becky’s comment immediately. A second later, it got the thumbs up from Adam Matthias.
Ellie combed her fingers through the tangled clump of hair at the back of her neck.
‘It’s not personal,’ she typed hurriedly. ‘I’ve got nothing against her. It’s a general thing about representacion.’ She waited a few painful seconds, staring at the screen and absently yanking out a handful of long mousy strands. ‘Representation,’ she corrected.
‘WTF!! Someone trashing pictures of you in your underwear!! – Not personal!?!!’ Jane commented beneath.
Ellie swallowed.
‘So were not allowed to talk about how girls are repsnted cos we’ll offnd someone? Not just abt Shannon,’ Tiffany Watson added quickly. Ellie thought she was in the year above – she must have stayed on to do a master’s.
‘Choice!?’ Becky’s thumbnail photo was a chip of tanned shoulder and a big brown eye. ‘Feminism is choice.’
‘Do whatever you want – that’s femnsm?’ Tiffany shot back.
‘I can get a Brazilian and b a feminist!!!’ yelled Jane.
Ellie’s brain swam with thick, gloopy weeds, bloated with guilt, sleeplessness and inarticulacy. Nadine had insisted they set up the Facebook page: ‘A place where people, like, debate and you post updates and targets and stuff.’ Ellie thought Nadine was probably right (and God knows, she didn’t have a clue), but every time she went on there and engaged in the ‘debate’ she’d gone out of her way to create, she found herself in a state of paralysing confusion.
‘I saw those slogans and thought FUCK YEAH,’ Caoimhe Louise Joyce pitched in. ‘It’s not about saying you can’t do this, you can’t do that, it’s a culture – I’m not against porn, but I don’t wanna be pornified all the time, I don’t want to HAVE to see myself that way when I’m on my way to a lecture.’ It was hard to express how grateful Ellie felt towards Caoimhe – a person she knew only as a small square of brick wall with a mural in Spanish – at that moment.
‘Unis a zillion times more sxst thn my schl,’ Tiffany Watson continued.
‘Listen, I think we should talk,’ said Justin.
Ellie tore herself away from the screen, heart pumping as if she’d spent the last hour in hand-to-hand combat.
Justin was staring at her, poised over a ringbinder, highlighter in hand. After the Agreement That Something Had To Be Done About The F-word, Justin had decided that he needed a change of scene. He stuffed his folders into reusable b
ags and carted them over to Ellie’s on his bike. At 10 a.m. next day he began the arduous business of Getting Down To It. Even from her own state of hopeless, wilful inactivity, Ellie could see he had no idea how to revise. He spent hours making fair copies of notes he already had and furiously re-underlining the important parts. Sometimes he got into a frenzy of material gathering, printing PDF after PDF from the library website, as if having something on paper was the same as reading it. At the end of each grinding hour, he would reward himself with a cup of tea and exactly three Rich Tea biscuits. Justin didn’t even like Rich Teas, but he thought they were a healthier option.
Ellie had considered giving him some advice, but the words ‘glass house’ and ‘throw stones’ came to mind. She was in no position to dole out revision tips – not strictly having started yet. Ellie totally agreed that Something Had To Be Done, but in practice she was hoping her continued denial would go unnoticed. If anyone wanted her, she’d be in her glass house, keeping still, quiet and as calm as possible while the temperature crept up and the oxygen dwindled.
A sudden worry struck her. ‘Do you mean about next year?’
‘Oh. No,’ said Justin, surprised. ‘I mean, we could chat about that . . . if you want.’ He bowed his head and gazed uncomprehendingly at a printout, demonstrating his perfect ease as to whether or not they discussed that now.
‘Um . . .’ An email popped up in the corner of her screen – ‘Interview Request: The Badger Hot Topic’. Ellie clicked on it with the speed of a reflex reaction. ‘Hi Ellie! How would you like to write the “Pro” column for “Is Campus Sexist?”’ asked a Melissa Gill, Senior Editor.
Ellie took a deep breath and slowly blew a raspberry.
‘Do you want to close your lid?’ Justin almost kept the edge of irritation out of his voice. ‘If we’re going to talk?’
Ellie slammed it down, and nodded earnestly. ‘Sorry. This campaign thing is a bit intense. Kind of nerve-racking.’ Since their vandalism spree, Ellie had spent roughly six hours a day in a frenzy of posting, emailing, tweeting and reading abuse about herself. She went from dizzying highs (a tweeted photo of a poster from another uni with ‘EDUCATION NOT OBJECTIFICATION’ scrawled across a poster for a RAG slave auction featuring two corseted women tied together) to dismal lows (the comments about her beneath a blog post entitled ‘Why Students Should Grow Up and Get Over Themselves’).
Justin arched back over his chair, revealing a few inches of white belly. In a quiet, unassuming way, he had been obsessing about his roll of stomach fat, subconsciously prodding it while he highlighted. Ellie didn’t think it’d be helpful to tell him it was the clearest example of anxiety displacement she’d ever witnessed. He heaved himself up. ‘But I want to talk about something else first. Is it a good idea to be getting so involved with this campaign now?’
‘Well, no, obviously.’ Ellie scratched her head, watching dry flakes of skin rain onto her laptop lid. ‘But it’s exciting as well. It feels like people want to talk about it.’
Justin frowned at her.
‘What?’
The ‘seriously concerned’ look kept coming. ‘I don’t want to be a pain in the arse,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘but what about your dissertation?’
With an almost inaudible groan, Ellie lowered her forehead to the table.
‘I know you’re stuck, but you’re not going to hand in nothing, are you?’
The groan grew louder.
‘That’d be such a waste.’
‘I know! I do fucking know that.’
‘So why don’t you meet whatshername, your supervisor, and ask for some help?’
‘It’s pointless.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Justin sternly. ‘It might make all the difference. Just do it, email her now.’
Ellie dragged herself up. ‘But didn’t you want to talk about next year?’
‘Send. That. First.’
It took Ellie an hour and a half to draft an email to Dr Longstaff, which Justin took one look at and said, ‘That’s good, but she might think it’s a little bit stalkerish.’ With his help, Ellie managed a neutral, two-line request. Even that was eye-wateringly painful, but when she finally hit send, she did feel fractionally lighter.
‘Good.’ Justin’s firm nod drifted into distraction. ‘So.’
Ellie saw that he was nervous, and wondered how much he’d been stewing over the moving-in question since he’d asked. The decision had been preying upon her in the empty, static patches of each wakeful night. What do I want? she’d asked herself, and when only vertiginous blankness presented itself, What’s the right thing to do? She’d imagined saying no and squandering the chance to be with somebody kind, someone who seemed to love her. Her dawn-light fantasies had deepened into morality tales in which Selfish Ellie Denied Love, and do you know, in the end, she died alone and miserable, because she didn’t know a good thing when she saw it? Ellie saw herself in twenty years’ time meeting Justin and his lovely wife and children, the natural and just result of his ability to love, and herself, withered and bent by the weight of her own pig-headedness. As she turned in bed once more – nose so close to the wall she could lick the woodchip paper – she became increasingly convinced of her own self-sabotaging disposition, her proven desire for what was bad for her. Look at last Christmas Eve’s near-miss with that ridiculous idiot from school, and the subsequent day spent in chest-heaving misery in bed. There was good reason for Ellie not to trust her impulses. What if they were telling her exactly what she shouldn’t do?
One thing she was sure about: Justin was good. Justin was a nice person, who deserved to be with another equally good and nice person. That was what she believed. Being grown up meant putting your own stupid destructive desires aside and focusing on somebody else for a change.
The idea was a powerful one. Becoming A Grown-up seemed to sneak past the element of choice and propose itself as a given, as a kind of destiny.
‘Actually I have thought about next year,’ Ellie told him, and at once a germ of gladness appeared inside her. She felt the abstract, arm’s-length happiness of causing another’s happiness, and it seemed to hold a promise for the better person she would be when all of her negative, mad shit was jettisoned, and she could be calm and good. She took a deep breath. ‘I’d really like to live with you.’
Justin’s eyes sprang open in surprise. ‘Really? You’re serious?’
She smiled and nodded. ‘I’m deadly serious . . . if the offer’s still open.’
‘Don’t be coy, Taber.’ Justin shook his head, an enormous smile slowly taking over his face. ‘As you’re no doubt aware, I’m completely in love with you.’
9
How Nietzsche Wrote
‘Now I know I need help, I feel so much better. Like, it’s okay to need help, you know?’ Ellie was sprawled on her bed, craning her neck to look at Justin’s upside-down back, hunched over the desk.
‘Hmm.’
‘In a weird way I got too into it.’ She hugged her knees into her chest. ‘I thought the help would be distracting, get in the way. Huuubris.’
‘Nyup.’
‘Usually I take whatever meagre help uni’s handing out. I turn up, you know? I attend. But I got all . . .’ She waggled a hand. ‘Anyway, the point is, after Dr Longstaff’s helped me, I might actually be able to do this, you know?’
There was a pause.
Ellie rolled up. ‘You’re trying to work, aren’t you?’
Justin turned round. Over the past week, his stubbly face had slackened and drooped – he looked as if he’d just staggered out of bed at 2 a.m. to go to the loo, rather than slogged through four hours of revision and a litre of Coke. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just – I really can’t mess this up again.’
‘Sorry. I’m going. I’ve got to leave in ten minutes anyway.’ Jumping off the bed, Ellie wrapped her arms round his waist and kissed the top of his head. His sides were a little softer and squishier than usual, she noticed. The observation made her feel prot
ective, as if he’d told her something private or shameful, and she hugged him tighter. Ever since the moving-in decision had been taken, she’d been brimming with relief – at least that wasn’t hanging over them. ‘Keep it up.’
Rose was ‘eating’ breakfast and much more easily distracted.
‘With help, I might actually be able to do this,’ repeated Ellie, as she paced the sweaty kitchen linoleum.
‘Hell, yes,’ Rose hyped obligingly, adding a tiny splash of skimmed milk to her tea.
‘I can do this.’
‘Course you can!’ Rose carefully watched the milk sink without trace. ‘It’s not like you’re stupider than every other arsehole at uni. I mean, who are these punks? They hit every branch on the dimwit tree!’
‘Yes. Right. I should get all my notes together.’ Ellie leafed through a pile of newspapers. ‘It’s like, there’s a certain stage of desperation where everything becomes very clear.’
‘You’ve got a letter by the way.’
‘Today’s the day.’ Ellie weeded out her scrawled notes. What did it matter if they didn’t make sense? She was sorting it.
The letter had an official uni stamp – the kind Ellie had barely seen since she received an offer.
‘Dear Ms. Taber,’ she read. Rose snorted a laugh. ‘This is a formal warning that if you do not desist from vandalising university property and inciting others to do so, the university will take legal action—’
‘Shiiiiit,’ Rose peered over her shoulder. Ellie swallowed and blinked hard, bringing the letter back into focus. ‘Bastards!’
‘. . . will also result in your expulsion from—’
‘They fucking live for sending this kind of letter!’
‘. . . ban from taking any examinations . . . graduating . . .’ Ellie skimmed over the rest, squeezing the thick, ridged paper between hot thumb and fingers. Even under normal circumstances, uni’s official communications made you feel like a half-citizen in some strange country, under suspicion for a crime you didn’t know you’d committed. But this was something else. At the thought of phoning her mum and telling her she wasn’t graduating, Ellie let out a dry croak.
Confidence Page 11
