Confidence

by Rowland Manthorpe

  ‘The sell-by date is July.’ Adé nudged her shoulder. ‘I will need to press you for a decision.’

  ‘Sorry, I was off! Give us a square then.’

  One thing you had to admit about Adé was that – to use her gran’s words – he was a very handsome young man. Being nice to handsome men was new territory for Ellie, who tended to believe that dickishness and handsomeness were directly proportionate, and went by the rule that you couldn’t trust a good-looking man as far as you could throw his pleasingly sculpted face. (A strange contradiction: the same view expressed of women would take her from 0 to 60 on the outrage scale before she’d pulled out the drive.) Thinking about it, she had to admit that Oscar was quite good-looking, but in the skewed, lateral way to which she was accustomed, unlike Adé’s no-doubts-about-it hotness.

  ‘So how’s things?’ offered Adé. ‘Busy?’

  ‘Oh, extremely.’

  ‘Thinking?’

  ‘Exactly. Thinking away, thinking very hard.’ Oh God, was she flirting with Adé now? What exactly was going on?

  ‘Not to mention.’ Maggie’s head popped over the partition. ‘Vandalising university property.’

  ‘It wasn’t me, guv.’ Ellie put her hands up. ‘I swear.’

  There had been a fresh wave of feminist vandalism, targeting posters for the new hockey team charity calendar. ‘OBJECTIFICATION’ someone had scrawled in marker pen, before abandoning the slogans and cutting to the chase: ‘THIS IS SEXIST SHIT’. Outside the engineering building, the same vandal, or perhaps another, had scored ‘BORING’ into the glass display case, scratching over the team, pictured with hockey shirts draped over their breasts.

  ‘Tell it to the judge,’ smiled Adé. ‘Is that what you’re planning this summer then, short stint in the slammer?’

  ‘Oh Christ, who knows? I feel like the world ends when May does. What about you?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got one thing I’m definitely doing, which makes me feel slightly better about life.’

  You’re going to work for Goldman’s, thought Ellie.

  ‘I’m doing summer work for this charity based where I’m from in Birmingham – like a children’s literacy thing.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s usually pretty fun.’

  ‘Yeah. Sounds . . .’

  ‘Anyway, want a beverage?’

  ‘Oh! Is it coffee time yet?’ Maggie brightened.

  ‘Definitely feels like mocha o’clock.’ Adé looked at Ellie. ‘I’ll get you one.’

  ‘I’ve just got to finish this plan . . .’ Ellie murmured apologetically.

  ‘No worries – hate to disturb that thinking.’

  As Adé walked by, Maggie shot Ellie a ‘get you’ look, and whispered, ‘Are you having a vending-machine-based frisson?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ murmured Ellie. ‘I mean, no. No.’

  ‘I wouldn’t blame you. Can I ask you something?’ Maggie looked over her shoulder and lowered her voice further, clamping her teeth ventriloquist-style. ‘When was the last time you had sex?’

  ‘Erm,’ Ellie stalled.

  ‘’Cause for me and Chris, it’s like . . .’ Maggie counted on her fingers. ‘Eighteen days. Nineteen including today. I mean, I’m starting to feel like I’m wasting my youth here, you know? Like my organs are going to shrivel up and—’

  ‘Look out.’

  Chris was on his way over. He couldn’t seem to go more than an hour without coming over to be close to Maggie – she was his life source. With a touch of relief, Ellie turned to Kant, sinking back into the grand, abstract world of theoretical cause and theoretical effect. She wasn’t in the frame of mind for cosy relationship moans.

  ‘Is it coffee time yet?’

  ‘Nearly.’ Chris leaned on Maggie’s head. ‘Twenty minutes.’

  Ellie’s phone flashed a text. Hoping for Justin and a sense of normality, she got a punctuation-happy Rose. ‘U got letter!!! shd i open??!’

  Unwilling to abandon her train of thought, Ellie replied, ‘S’ok. I’ll get it at home x’.

  Rose had recently turned into a kind of unofficial housekeeper. She was treating Justin like a household pet, to be overfed, cooed over and occasionally kicked, no doubt with a liberal helping of knowing remarks about how ‘difficult’ and ‘distant’ Ellie had been recently. It was bloody annoying. Mind you, Ellie realised, perhaps she wasn’t best placed to complain about people treating Justin badly.

  ‘You at the Shackle today? X’ added Ellie, not really caring about the answer. She tried to refocus, pushing her phone to the far corner of her desk.

  ‘I’m having a shortbread,’ announced Maggie. ‘Screw the schedule, it’s time to partay!’

  ‘opnd it,’ Rose shot back. ‘SHIIIIIIITTT!!! Ur xPelld!!!’

  Fearful of a recriminatory call from Sara, Charlie allowed his phone to die, its dwindling bar a painful symbol of his own depletion. His SSB hangover wouldn’t leave him alone. Unable to stomach his customary double-cheeseburger antidote, he lay in bed watching clip after clip of massive NFL hits, each one giving less satisfaction.

  Three days slipped by in this manner, sodden with revision guilt and the exhaustion of inactivity. Only when Charlie finally plugged in and found a reassuringly breezy message from Sara did he recover some of his natural optimism. He put aside the nagging sense that surely she couldn’t be that cool about it and dragged himself from his pit.

  During his forty-minute mid-morning shower, Charlie came to a regretful decision. Having an awesome time was ruining him: he would have to put it on hold – temporarily – and concentrate on exams.

  Half an hour into executing this plan, Charlie was already feeling more wholesome. It was lucky, he thought, he was so resilient.

  Charlie’s revision motto was, ‘Don’t work hard, work smart.’ His revision method was to look for the answers on the internet. Today he was looking for the answers to that low-hanging fruit, Contemporary Italian Politics. He had downloaded ten past papers and scanned them for questions that came up year after year. The paper was actually less predictable than he remembered, but sure enough he’d spotted some patterns.

  Now Charlie was on the hunt for a lecture from the University of Alabama, or Calcutta, or Adelaide, anywhere they spoke English, which went through this exact question in a five-point plan. He’d fill in the gaps with other people’s essays and his smartwork would be done in barely half a day.

  ‘What?’

  Alistair had spun round in his chair to glare at Charlie. ‘You’re jiggling.’

  Charlie looked down to see his leg pumping up an invisible airbed. ‘I’m honestly not doing that.’

  ‘Well, stop not doing it.’ Alistair swivelled back to hunch over his desk.

  Charlie was working in Alistair’s room. ‘You can’t outsource your concentration,’ Alistair had grumbled, but in the end he’d had to relent. Charlie needed someone else in the room. On his own, he didn’t stand a chance against all the porn on the internet. He even found his own body too distracting (his ingrown hairs were bad again). Plus the whole thing felt sad, like Saturday nights in when you were fifteen. Charlie could have gone to the library, but he was no fool – he knew he’d leave five hours later, coffee-dazzled and sugar-high, exhausted from a long series of catch-ups and inquisitions about the state of play between him and Sara. In her absence, his only possible work companion was trusty, musty Alistair in his dingy monk’s cell.

  Google was being difficult. Charlie had gone through to page seven on all sorts of question variations and still nothing was coming up. It was slightly concerning, but that was revision for you. Like start-up success, it wasn’t a linear process: for a long time you had nothing and then – BAM! You’d struck gold.

  Charlie was chasing a link on a weird website that wanted him to pay for ‘guaranteed first class essays’, when without warning he found himself searching for ‘how to write a business plan’. He still needed to bash one out for Social Tiger, and draft some brand values, plu
s there were a few other tasks he couldn’t quite remember. He started googling the competition to check the deadline, which he had a feeling was close, and that somehow turned into flicking through photos of SSB on Facebook to see if anything new had come up since this morning. That second year secretary was in the back of one (sudden and unwarranted shame surged in Charlie). He hurried on to Halloween Rehab last year.

  ‘Boop,’ Sara surfaced on Facebook chat. Boop was her invented word meaning ‘Hello’, ‘How are you?’, ‘I miss you’ and various other shades of affection that Charlie preferred to filter out.

  ‘Yo,’ he replied, still flicking through photos. He was deep in friends-of-friends territory now, on holiday with a group of girls, somewhere equivalent to Magaluf.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Revising.’

  ‘Oh well I’ll leave you to it’ – smiley face.

  ‘Cool yeah.’ Sara seemed to take his dismissal so well, he felt obliged to add, ‘Everything ok?’

  ‘Fine, yeah. Just checking in. Keep going!’

  ‘Will do.’ By now he almost wanted her to stay on the line. Sara really was a genius at pushing his buttons.

  ‘xxxxxxxxx’

  ‘Bye xxxxx.’ Charlie carefully kept his kiss-trail half the length of Sara’s – one of many lines in the sand – and crossed off his Facebook tab. He needed to focus on finding the answer to ‘How would you account for the dramatic political breakthrough of Berlusconi and his Forza Italia! Party?’ quickly, so he could go to the gym before supper.

  But God, revision was boring. Stray thoughts flashed up in his head like pop-up ads. Berlusconi – did he really put an exclamation mark in his party’s name? That guy, seriously: What a lad. Charlie chuckled and looked round the room for a response. A tub of E45, the dusty hair gel that Alistair would never admit to using, hatched pairs of contact lens cases sitting neatly in a row . . .

  ‘Hey.’

  Alistair didn’t reply.

  ‘Al. Al-lis-tair.’

  ‘I’m doing a timed essay.’

  ‘Stop the clock. I’ve got something to ask you.’

  Alistair made a grinding noise at the back of his throat, paused his stopwatch and wheeled round to face Charlie.

  ‘What do you think I should do? With my life.’

  Clearly, this wasn’t the question Alistair had been expecting. His expression suggested he’d been asked to study Charlie’s vomit and describe its distinctive characteristics.

  ‘So I’ve got this Social Tiger pitch coming up.’

  ‘You want to be an entrepreneur then?’

  ‘I don’t know! That’s what I’m asking.’

  Alistair sighed. ‘Don’t you have enough on your plate right now?’

  Charlie was remembering why he didn’t talk to Alistair about this sort of thing. ‘What – exams? I’ll be fine.’

  ‘If you’re sure. How many marks do you need to get in them?’

  ‘Must be about . . . sixty-three-ish? Give or take. I’ve had a couple of essays back since then, but—’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t know . . .’ Charlie’s 2:1 target was something he had a feel for. It wasn’t as if you could aim for a particular mark in the exam, so he preferred to be guided by instinct. In his opinion, Alistair’s obsession with figures was unhealthy, an offshoot of the way he couldn’t walk past a vacant plug socket without making sure the switch was turned off.

  Alistair was suddenly urgent. ‘You’ve got to know exactly.’

  Gratified to have drawn something out of him, Charlie sat up. ‘I’ll check now. Can you do the percentages?’

  ‘You’re a dick, you know that?’

  ‘But I’m your dick. I can give you so much pleasure, so easily.’ Grinning, Charlie navigated onto the My Account section of Blackboard, not expecting to see anything new. As far as he could see, lecturers at university had about half as much to do as teachers at school, but they took twice as long to get your marks up. To his surprise, there were new numbers in the box – and those numbers made his blood run cold.

  ‘Well?’ asked Alistair, after a lengthy pause.

  ‘Fifty-six in Genocide. Fifty-four in New Labour.’

  The marks were actually 54 and 51. Charlie had no idea why he’d told this tiny, pointless lie.

  Alistair cleared his throat nervously.

  ‘I can’t believe it. I’m screwed.’ Charlie sprang up, nearly hitting his head on the sloping ceiling. ‘Genocide – that was my failsafe! New Labour? I don’t get it. I nailed that presentation!’

  Alistair made a noise that said Clearly you didn’t.

  Charlie was too disturbed to argue. ‘Oh my God. I’m going to get a two:two. No one will ever hire me.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to be an entrepreneur.’

  Charlie fixed Alistair with a stare that mingled hatred and desperation.

  ‘Hang on. Don’t panic. What mark . . . Are you going to get that?’

  Charlie’s phone was ringing with a number he didn’t recognise. ‘No. Yes.’ His brain had frozen. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Charlie Naughton?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Arthur Collins from Flagship Promotions. I’m calling to let you know that your application was successful. You have the opportunity to be part of the Flagship promotional team.’

  ‘Ah.’ Charlie had forgotten all about the application. Into the pause he added, ‘Excellent.’

  ‘We’d like you to be a Team Member for Stop and Search this Friday.’

  ‘Stop and Search?’

  Alistair eyed him warily, as though concerned he might have had a run-in with the police. Right, Charlie projected furiously, who knows what a 2:2 candidate is capable of? Prick.

  ‘An exciting new scent. We’re looking to build long-term relationships with promising individuals. Depending on performance, you could rise to Team Member Star and, if you show leadership potential, Team Innovator.’

  ‘Okay.’ Charlie’s mind fast-tracked to Innovator and then jumped directly to running his own, better, version of the same company. He was sipping a latte in a spaceship-style meeting pod, while Fergus pleaded with him for a job.

  ‘We’ll convene in the Union at eight-thirty a.m. Be presentable.’ Charlie held a finger up to Alistair, who was attempting to return to his essay. ‘Black jeans or trousers, no flip-flops.’

  ‘Sure – I mean, of course.’ Charlie wanted to ask how much he would be paid, but it seemed rude somehow, the sort of thing that someone who didn’t want it enough might say.

  ‘See you then.’ Arthur hung up.

  ‘What a day.’ Charlie released a pent-up breath. ‘I’ve got a job! Just a small one – but something for the CV.’

  Alistair tucked his chin, barely suppressing his disapproval.

  ‘I know, I know, I’ve got to revise, but . . .’ Charlie shook his head distractedly. ‘I need experience more than ever now. Besides, if Social Tiger takes off, I won’t need a two:one—’

  ‘But you still want one. You said—’

  ‘Of course I do. The thing is. . .’ Charlie tried to figure out how he could explain it to Alistair. ‘It’s the way I work. If the world is riding on this one set of exams, it’s too much, you know? I’m actually being strategic.’

  ‘Right.’ Alistair didn’t seem to appreciate this peek at the backstage machinery. But then, Charlie thought, Alistair had no vision; that had always been his problem.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s under control.’

  ‘But why waste your time doing—’

  ‘It’s fine!’ snapped Charlie. ‘I can make my own decisions, okay?’

  ‘Can you?’ said Alistair sarcastically. ‘Brilliant. Do that then.’

  Alistair started scribbling at his stationery. Charlie rolled his eyes and looked back at the screen. The seventh page of Google echoed like the lost cavern of the damned. Charlie tried to think of a new search term, but agitated as he was, there was no chance of
getting back to work.

  ‘Screw this.’ He slammed his laptop lid. ‘I’m going to the ladz’.’

  13

  Will to Power

  Every animal, Nietzsche argued, instinctively strives to feel as powerful as possible. ‘What is good?’ he asked. ‘All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.’

  Perhaps this is a good time to explain what happened with Nietzsche and the Nazis.

  Nietzsche died in 1900, so he could never have been a Nazi in the historical sense, but his name is indelibly associated with the horrors of the Third Reich. The blame lies with his sister Elisabeth. She was the real Nazi in the family, a toxic anti-Semite with an obsessive love for her elder brother. Nietzsche despised her. But after his collapse in 1889, she was left with responsibility for his legacy.

  Elisabeth took control of Nietzsche’s works, rearranging them piece by piece and using them (as well as forged letters, altered to remove derisory references to her) to promote herself as their true heir and representative. It was Elisabeth’s cut-and-paste version of his philosophy that appealed to the Nazis, who used it to give their regime intellectual credibility. Nietzsche’s public and private writing makes it absolutely clear that he had no sympathy for Nazism – ‘These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!’ he protested when he saw the use to which Elisabeth was putting his works, even in his lifetime. But in his insane state he was powerless to resist her twisted supervision. When Elisabeth died, in 1935, Hitler attended her funeral. On her instructions, Nietzsche’s grave, which had been placed next to his mother and father’s, was moved one space to the left, so she could occupy pride of place between her parents and her famous brother.

  Nietzsche cannot be absolved of all responsibility for the way his works were interpreted. He set out to cause a stir. He enjoyed being seen as wicked. (Or rather, he thought he enjoyed being seen as wicked. Having thrown out the challenge, ‘I am not a man, I am dynamite,’ he was initially delighted to see a rare review of Beyond Good and Evil pick up on the phrase. Soon, however, he was worrying that ‘danger’ had been stressed too much and he would have ‘all sorts of police’ onto him.) He was a sucker for a nice turn of phrase and he went all out to grab his readers’ attention. This, in a sense, was what happened with the will to power.