Confidence

by Rowland Manthorpe

  ‘Just wanted to check you’re all right.’ Fergus strode in, setting the mug on Sara’s pile of Vogues.

  ‘Um, yeah, I’m okay.’

  ‘Tough night?’ Was he really going to pretend that Charlie wasn’t there? ‘Well, just so you know, we’re about to start Rocky. “Eat lightning and crap thunder!”’

  ‘All right. I’ll be down in a bit, okay?’

  ‘I’ll save you some eggs.’

  Beneath the duvet, Charlie was running out of air. If only he’d crept out in the middle of the night, he reflected bitterly, it might have been a salvageable fuck-up – ‘one of those’, as the football commentators said. Charlie imagined going downstairs and sitting in the living room making fake chit-chat with Fergus and Meredith, all the while pretending they didn’t have great thought-Zeppelins popping out of their heads saying ‘What’s this prick doing here?’ and ‘Are they back together or what?’

  Charlie had to escape. He stretched out a foot to scout for his mankini, heart sinking at the thought of the ball-chafing walk of shame home.

  ‘Hey,’ Sara returned to the airlock. ‘There you are.’

  ‘Here I am.’ Charlie’s toes curled round Lycra.

  ‘Do you want some breakfast?’

  ‘Um . . .’ Monkey-like, he transferred mankini from foot to hand. ‘I’m actually feeling a little bit sick.’

  By reinstating Good and Bad in place of Good and Evil, Nietzsche hoped to tilt the balance away from guilt and back towards confidence.

  So what’s the difference? First, while Good and Evil are absolutes, Good and Bad are on a sliding scale, more like Better and Worse, with a lot of allowance made for the particular circumstance and context. Second, Good and Evil are always tipped towards Evil, like a seesaw with a weight on the end. Evil is so much more evil than Good is good, whereas Good and Bad have a rough equality.

  Good and Bad is the morality of confidence. Think of the way confidence helps you avoid taking things personally. When you’re feeling confident, you don’t mind criticism, because you know it’s not you that’s being criticised, but the thing you’ve done. (One reason why confidence is such a valued trait in the workplace: because, of course, at work, no one ever ‘criticises’ anyone – there’s only feedback, which is always constructive, and should never be taken personally.) Good and Evil pins actions on people. There’s this whole list of things that are evil, and if you do one of them, you’re evil too. That’s what sin is, and that’s why, according to Christianity, we need forgiveness. Good and Bad, by contrast, lets you make the distinction between yourself and your actions. You’re not an awful person because you forgot to log out or didn’t code the invoice correctly. You did something ‘worse’; it’s not the end of the world.

  Which raises the question: what is so dangerous and squidlike about that? How you answer that question depends in large part on how important it is to you that people take responsibility for their actions. So you’ve done something bad: you’ve hurt someone you love, even though when you did so you were only expressing your instinct. Should you feel guilty about it, the worming moral guilt of Christianity’s slave-bred conscience? Or should you say to yourself, ‘Well this happened, but there’s no point beating myself up about it’?

  Nietzsche would take this further still, by arguing that it is not what we do that matters, but how it is done, and, most importantly, who does it. Having done something bad, the true master would respond: ‘I am the only context for my actions. If I did this, it must be right.’

  Ellie didn’t feel guilty. Nauseous and slightly manic, yes. Guilty, no. Perhaps it lay in wait for her, planning to pounce unexpectedly as soon as she relaxed. She sat on the tiny, hard bench at the back of the chemist’s, waiting for her pharmaceutical inquisition.

  ‘Why is it,’ she texted Nadine, ‘that the sexual mores of Victorian Britain live on in the procedure for getting the morning-after pill?’

  ‘Two for one on any of our organic or hypoallergenic range . . .’ the radio wittered on.

  Nadine replied instantly: ‘U no ur a finalist when . . . even ur humble brags about doing it turn into an essay question.’

  Ellie smirked, pleasantly embarrassed. ‘2chez.’

  She’d already told Nadine. (The verdict on PC Mark: ‘pretty nice – a bit spitty’.) But if possible, she wasn’t going to tell Rose, who had texted a demi-semi-apology around midday: ‘Spect you’re feeling utterly ashamed of your disgusting behaviour yesterday, Miss. violence is never the answer ps. Didn’t pork. Vommed instead.’ Telling Justin, she had decided, was unnecessarily cruel.

  This embryonic lie – a lie she hadn’t yet told – had already opened up a whole new dimension for Ellie. Until now, it had never struck her that she could simply lie and that it might not matter. For the first time, Ellie was consciously creating a disjuncture between the truth and the story she told her most intimate friends – perhaps, in time, herself. This dizzying rupture made her feel as if she had ascended to the next layer, where she could look down from a great height on the things she used to believe were important or real, and see them for the naïve, immature constructs they were.

  Ellie was ushered into a tiny white room by a middle-aged Asian man. She told him her age, and when asked, assured him there was no chance of her being pregnant before last night (though the second he suggested it, she began to fear she was).

  ‘And how long has it been since you had intercourse?’ He averted his eyes politely.

  ‘Um . . . eight hours-ish?’ They had actually had sex twice, but presumably he didn’t need a blow by blow. Afterwards, they’d taken an early walk along the canal, kissed under a bridge, eaten some instant noodles, and chatted about a few of the things that Oscar didn’t believe in (exams, institutions, monogamy and borders, for a start).

  ‘Did you use any protection?’

  ‘Nope.’ Ellie resisted the impulse to make an apologetic face. She had been on the pill, but came off it over Easter, complaining that she felt bad enough already. Since then her and Justin had been using condoms combined with the ‘revision method’ – a cycle of worry and boredom that precluded all sexual desire.

  Only after they ran through allergies and side effects and headed out to the till did Ellie realise that she didn’t have her purse. She was hit by a vivid memory of the gloopy sound it made as it slipped into the water, and the smell of the canal on her hand. A frantic search of her jeans pockets uncovered £2.43.

  ‘Um . . .’ she stood frozen at the till.

  ‘That’s £25, please.’

  ‘Oh, God, I’m really sorry.’ Ellie looked around, mentally running through the seemingly endless steps of going home, finding her passport (if it was even at uni), taking it to the bank and returning. ‘I’ll . . .’

  At that moment, a pale-looking boy stepped through the automatic doors, dressed like a stray, rejected member of Village People. Without stopping to think, Ellie approached him. ‘Charlie, hi. This is going to sound mad, but could I possibly borrow £25? Well, £23.56.’

  ‘Erm . . .’ Charlie came to a halt by the perfume stand, pulling himself out of an all-consuming meditation.

  Ellie gave him a bright smile. ‘I lost my purse last night, and I really need to buy something.’

  ‘Oh, right, er . . .’ He patted absently at his chest and pockets. (He seemed to be wearing a swimsuit.)

  ‘Basically – I don’t know why I’m being so coy – I need to buy the morning-after pill, and it costs £25. Do you mind?’

  ‘Oh, um . . . I mean, of course, yeah.’

  ‘I’ve done the interrogation and everything.’

  ‘Right,’ he frowned in confusion.

  ‘But we might have to rejoin the queue.’

  ‘Yeah, I mean, no problem at all.’ Charlie obligingly stepped into the queue with her, taking it all in his slightly baffled stride. That was the beautiful thing about manners, she reflected, they could be adapted to almost any situation.

  His politeness was ca
tching. ‘Thanks so much for this,’ Ellie smiled again. ‘Oh sorry, did you want to buy something?’

  ‘Just some gum.’ Charlie shook his head. ‘I think it’s at the till.’

  ‘And I should’ve asked: how are you?’

  ‘Oh.’ Charlie raised his eyebrows in an expression of dazed shock. ‘Well. As we’re being honest . . . I think I did something fucking stupid last night.’

  You slept with Sara, Ellie thought. ‘Oh really? Well, that makes two of us.’

  ‘Yeah, I . . .’ Charlie rubbed his neck and winced. ‘I slept with Sara.’

  ‘Oh!’ she tried to sound surprised. ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ He scratched his chin for a while. ‘Not my smartest move.’

  ‘Hard not to?’ she asked encouragingly.

  ‘Yeah, I mean . . .’ He stared intensely at a moisturiser display. ‘Just fucking stupid really.’ With her newfound perspective, Ellie felt rather sorry for him. It’s not easy breaking up, she thought hazily. At the end of the day, we’re all people trying to get by.

  ‘Me again,’ she greeted the pharmacist. ‘I’ve managed to find a sponsor.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Charlie came to. He chose some gum and at length, pulled a credit card from his shorts. ‘Should go through . . .’

  The precious paper bag was handed over and with a courtly grace, Charlie also offered Ellie some gum. By this stage, he was warming up. As they left, he quipped, with an avuncular air, ‘I hope you and Justin are more careful in future.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ellie laughed flippantly. ‘Well, maybe one of us needs to be more careful than the other.’ She knew she shouldn’t have said it, but somehow she didn’t care. part of her wanted Charlie to know that she wasn’t staying in with Justin, a condom-splitting drama providing a flare of excitement in their otherwise boring lives. ‘But maybe also don’t mention that to anyone,’ she added quickly.

  ‘Right. Oh. Oh, I get it. Of course.’

  ‘And email me your bank details.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Charlie batted a hand. ‘I mean, it’s—’

  ‘All in a good cause?’ smiled Ellie.

  ‘Right,’ Charlie nodded. ‘Listen, also, I’m really sorry about that whole car thing.’ A surprisingly pained look flickered across his face.

  ‘Oh God, forget it—’

  ‘No, I mean it—’

  ‘Honestly.’ Standing on the street, Ellie felt a rush of random affection: towards uni, Oscar, Charlie, the town itself . . . ‘And thank you. Thanks a lot.’ She stopped just short of giving him a hug.

  ‘All in a day’s work.’

  ‘See you around then?’

  ‘Sure thing.’ Charlie raised a hand, walking backwards past the skater shop. ‘Any time.’

  12

  Repression

  For Nietzsche, the worst thing about guilt was the way it encouraged repression. Through his influence on Freud (who reported that he had to stop reading Nietzsche because he feared he would find he had nothing left to add), Nietzsche’s views on the dangers of this condition ended up becoming part of both psychological and popular culture. However, whereas Freud pinpointed the origins of repression in the development of the child in infancy, for Nietzsche, repression was caused first and foremost by Christianity.

  Repression was what happened when the instinct was blocked or stifled. ‘All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards,’ Nietzsche wrote. By restricting natural drives such as selfishness and aggression, Christianity had prevented them from flowing freely into action. people were forced to vent their drives against themselves, like a caged animal gnawing on its foot.

  Nietzsche depicted Christianity as a kind of spiritual anorexia. Often, people think of anorexia as a disease of the weak-willed: if only you’d just get a grip, they say, then you could stop this nonsense in a second. But the last thing an anorexic needs to do is get a grip – on the contrary, what they need is for their grip to loosen. The problem with anorexics isn’t that they’re weak-willed, but that they’re too strong-willed, and this crushing will – what Nietzsche would call ‘the will to power’ – has been directed inwards, onto themselves.

  Nietzsche’s ideal was affirmation of self and life: ‘Saying “Yes” to life even in its strangest and hardest problems.’ From the monks and celibate priests of Catholicism, from the sombre suits and bare halls of Protestantism, from the emaciated, virgin Jesus hanging on the cross and the sanctification of monogamy in marriage, he diagnosed the central doctrine of Christianity as a continual, controlling No. ‘The ascetic ideal’, he called this attitude, which he said could be found in every aspect of Christian belief and ritual. Even the idea of heaven was a kind of No. By setting up a vision of pure, unchanging perfection, it denied everything that was messy, animal and unsettled about life – in other words, life itself. ‘A green and bitter gaze is turned against physiological growth, especially against its expression, beauty, joy; while pleasure is sought in failure, withering, pain, misfortune, ugliness, arbitrary atonement, self-flagellation, self-sacrifice.’

  Nietzsche’s focus on repression may seem dated to modern ears. Not only do we live in a post-Christian world, or so the theory goes, we also feel, post-Sixties, as if we have moved on from repression, and freed ourselves of the hang-ups of previous generations. But as Nietzsche emphasised, acting on instinct was never that straightforward: ‘Who can know what happens within himself, what conversations take place within the sacred darkness of his soul?’ Even if we were able to grow up in complete freedom, it still wouldn’t be clear what we really wanted or how we should go about getting it.

  For the next day or two, Ellie went around with a burning in her belly, a feeling she remembered from school on Monday mornings after she’d kissed somebody on Saturday. Somebody nice. She remembered, in particular, under the canal bridge, a sheer, thoughtless pleasure she almost hadn’t recognised. The memory kept rebounding, never seeming to lose its force. Could it be, she began to wonder, that she actually liked Oscar?

  On reflection, though, Ellie had to admit that she didn’t miss him or want to see him. Rather than lacking somebody, she was full and easy, untroubled by either solitude or company (if anything this made other people more interested in her – they seemed to register a change, as if she smelled different). Ellie took quiet satisfaction from her secret – it cordoned off her actions and made them hers. She had done something unexpected, and in doing so, discovered a private, internal world, a reservoir of will, still to be mapped out.

  After a while of this, it was almost a relief to feel guilty. That was in character; she was used to that. What exactly made her actions so fascinating, she asked herself – having a tawdry one-night stand? Lying? Being a bit of an arsehole? When the molten feeling subsided, there didn’t seem much to be proud of.

  And of course, she didn’t want to be with Oscar. Yes, he was sexy, interesting, unusually free. But how could you be with Oscar anyway? It would be like trying to take in an urban fox.

  What she wanted was to be with someone calm and honest and kind. Someone like Justin – Justin, in fact. Perhaps, she began to reason, sleeping with Oscar was what she needed to do in order to stay with Justin. She’d had a miserable couple of months, several when she thought about it. She’d gone a little crazy and got it out of her system, expelled the bad energy, been reborn . . . Whatever. The end result was that she and Justin were getting along much better. They’d started the second series of The Sopranos and Justin was experimenting with edible seaweed. Now the madness was over, she could settle down, be nice to her boyfriend, and revise.

  ‘Revising is like being waterboarded.’ Maggie rubbed her eyes. ‘How can you concentrate for so long? Is it coffee time yet?’

  ‘Nope, sorry.’

  ‘I’m living from one shortbread biscuit to the next. That’s my unit of time now – the shortbread.’

  Ellie was working at the desk next to Maggie, on the mezzanine level of the airport-like history faculty. It
had happened just like that. One minute she was awkwardly ignoring her former friends, blocked up with accreted social anxiety, like limescale in a kettle. The next she plonked herself by Maggie with a cheerful, ‘Hello, stranger! Great to see you!’

  Someone – neither her nor decisively not her – had flicked a switch. The impossible had come to look not merely achievable, but easy, almost enjoyable.

  Rather than a form of torture, Ellie had decided to approach revision as a long, luxurious mull, a slow-motion consideration of questions that happened upon her. What is, say, duty? What is the relation of speech to action, when it comes down to it? What is reality? She felt she was peeling back layers in order to sift at a geological level, a place where time was measured in millennia rather than months, minutes or shortbreads, and existence was made up of giant, universal concepts that slotted together like the bricks in a game of Tetris.

  ‘Duty = categorical imperative = reason’ she printed carefully on a Post-it, which she stuck to the partition.

  ‘Can I interest you in a Caramac?’ Adébayo appeared behind her shoulder.

  ‘Um . . .’ She turned to look at him in surprise.

  ‘I’ve bitten off more caramel-flavoured substance than I can chew.’ Adé was a broad-shouldered, rugby-playing type, the type she’d discovered she was allergic to about two weeks into uni. She had a searing memory of him at Rehab in first year, doing a row of flaming sambucas while a group of ‘ladz’ who should know better chanted, ‘Get it down, Zulu warrior!’ If he’d approached her this time last year (unlikely – he’d have had to track her down to Justin’s living room first, and he was almost certainly exclusively shagging lacrosse players at the time), she’d probably have made some unnecessarily withering remark. She thought Adé was up himself, and on a deep level, scared of girls, and a fucking idiot.

  Now, such harsh judgements felt out of tune with her mood. Did she want to be forever pigeonholed according to her own first-year errors? Hadn’t they all grown up since then? Perhaps, at this new moment, on the cusp of adulthood, everybody deserved a bit more respect.