Confidence

by Rowland Manthorpe

  Being a Stop and Search Brand Ambassador was even more pointless than he’d envisioned. Charlie was essentially face-to-face spamming, handing out sample sticks (which looked remarkably like applicator tampons) of a scent he had privately christened ‘Lynx Funeral’ in return for email addresses. Charlie didn’t even have USBs to offer: he had nothing to sell but himself.

  Two girls in headscarves passed by the stall, sipping on ice pops.

  ‘Can I interest you in an exciting new scent?’ Charlie sprang towards them. Their eyes glazed over; benign but implacable, they padded past.

  ‘You’d think we were trying to mace people, not give them free perfume,’ commented Ginger Jacob. Jacob was Charlie’s ‘buddy’ for the day – according to Arthur, they were supposed to buoy each other up when the going got tough, and offer honest, constructive feedback on interpersonal style. Charlie had been horrified to discover that Jacob was in first year. It made him feel suddenly ancient – Jacob was already racing ahead of him, getting experience he hadn’t even known he needed back then. Charlie felt like one of those sad thirty-year-olds starting out on a new career because they’d cocked up the first one.

  He tried to emit what Arthur called ‘selling energy’ as a group of second years approached. ‘How about some useless plastic in return for your email address? You can use a fake one.’

  A skinny hipster type laughed – but somehow the joke was on Charlie even though he’d been the one to make it.

  ‘It’s kind of like being homeless, isn’t it?’ remarked Jacob, as another swathe of revisers filed past. ‘It’s true what they say – the worst part is being ignored. When I see a beggar, I look them straight in the eye and say, “Sorry mate, no change.” That’s because I’m saving my change for the fruit machine. But how much better do they feel having had that bit of human contact?’

  ‘Oh, no, not them,’ groaned Charlie, as Penny and Meredith wafted into the Square. Penny stopped to unwrap her sandwich, carefully pull out tomatoes and drop them one by one into the bin.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘They’re my ex’s lynch mob.’

  Behind them came Tom Race, swaggering towards the law faculty. Charlie quickly looked away. The cheese-finishing incident (‘Stiltongate’, Charlie would have called it, if the whole thing didn’t make him feel so awful) had ended with Charlie refusing to go on – not because he didn’t want to, but because he simply couldn’t handle it. ‘Pussy,’ Bradder had spat delightedly, shortly before Charlie trudged out of the house. Race had rolled his eyes as if to say, You’ve only just noticed?

  Afterwards, back at home and in bed in the middle of the afternoon, Charlie was forced to admit to himself he’d been nursing a secret hope that he wasn’t just ‘Ben’s mate’; that he too might enter into the ladz’ post-shame bond. Well, it wasn’t to be. As it turned out, all the shame would be Charlie’s, seeing as nobody else was using theirs.

  With a regal smirk, Race passed by, as if the path was his personal red carpet and Charlie the second under-butler.

  ‘How’s progress here?’ Without warning, Arthur was upon them, clocking the pitiful list of emails and stacks of remaining flyers.

  ‘Um . . .’ Charlie did his best to muster a self-motivated air. ‘We were just saying, it’s difficult to distract people from revision, so—’

  ‘Distract students from revision? You can do better than that. Look. How about I watch and give you some feedback?’

  Arthur gestured for Charlie to take the floor, while he cupped his chin in a parody of observation. Charlie assessed his options. There was an Amnesty International stand, two first-year girls sitting on the wall (one of whom seemed to be crying) and – Charlie’s heart sank – Penny and Meredith.

  ‘Hi, guys, how’s it going?’ he opened, attempting to usher them out of Arthur’s immediate radius.

  Meredith looked at him in open hostility. ‘What is this – racial drag?’

  ‘Hi Charlie,’ smiled Penny, flashing her eyes as if she’d finally found somebody who could truly understand her (God, she gave Charlie the creeps). ‘I’m good, fine, well, you know, terrible, but . . .’

  ‘Oh, tell me about it,’ he parroted, as Arthur sidestepped over and lingered at an awkward distance. ‘Revision’s a nightmare.’

  ‘No, it’s my house – we’ve got rats.’ She pulled a disgusted face. ‘So I’m taking refuge at Sara and Meredith’s. I’m actually sleeping in Sara’s bed with her!’ Penny smiled, as though Charlie would be especially tickled by this snippet.

  ‘Ah,’ said Charlie. Judging by Meredith’s expression, she was finding this conversational tack as weird as he was. ‘Well, what I wanted to ask . . .’ He tried to ignore a new and insistent gnawing in his gut. Surely he couldn’t be jealous of Penny? That was absurd. Arthur had edged closer and was hovering behind Charlie’s shoulder. ‘I wanted to ask—’

  ‘The only problem is we keep distracting each other from working. I should be doing ten hours a day by now. But you know what it’s like – Fergus suggests a tea break, then it’s a beer break and . . .’ Penny rolled her eyes at herself, like, My problem is that when the party starts, I just can’t help being the life and soul.

  Charlie didn’t even feel strong enough to defend himself against Penny’s usual guff. He loathed himself for being bothered by her. ‘Right, well.’ Behind Charlie, Arthur cleared his throat and made a note on his BlackBerry. ‘I’m actually promoting a new scent today. Would you like to try a sample and sign our mailing list?’

  Meredith was already moving towards the library. ‘No.’

  ‘I suppose I could.’ Penny looked after her distractedly.

  ‘Great, thanks!’ Charlie handed Penny the clipboard and offered to hold her sandwich. Feeling he ought to do more, he used his teeth to pull off the lid from a plastic stick and wafted it in Penny’s direction. Painfully, he managed to squeeze out, ‘It’s a fresh scent.’

  ‘There. Will that do?’ Penny handed back the clipboard, ignoring the stick. In loopy handwriting, she’d printed ‘pennyandsara@hotmail.com’. Charlie stared at the paper, momentarily stupefied.

  ‘Nice to see you, Charlie.’ Taking her sandwich, Penny weaved towards the library’s automatic doors.

  The last remains of a brittle smile fell from Charlie’s eyes. His head dropped back and he stared up at the cloud-streaked sky. ‘Take me away,’ he thought. ‘Please just take me away.’

  ‘Take away what?’ boomed Arthur. ‘Right. Feedback from me. Feedback from your buddy. Self feedback. Then we’ll go again. Ready?’

  15

  Greatness

  Nietzsche detested the notion of ‘well-being’, because it implied an affinity between confidence and happiness. For him, even if such an affinity existed, it should not be condoned or in any way encouraged. His philosophy aimed not at happiness or contentment, but at great deeds and glorious achievements.

  For Nietzsche, all that was bad about well-being could be summed up by the phrase ‘English happiness’. England was the birthplace of utilitarianism, the philosophy which measured the accomplishment of a society by how successfully it achieved the greatest happiness for the greatest number – as if, sneered Nietzsche, human achievement could be measured by an average. Greatness for him was defined by its highest peaks, not by its lowest common denominator. Besides, going in search of greatness often involved unhappiness, since without being hard on yourself, how could you ever hope to attain true excellence?

  As ever, Nietzsche was speaking from personal experience. No stranger to self-discipline, he learnt as a schoolboy to immerse his foot in a bowl of freezing water to keep himself awake while studying. (His attack on self-denial stemmed from intimate knowledge of the ascetic temperament.) As an adult, he suffered from terrible migraines, yet even these, he believed, were an aid to creativity, as he claimed in Ecce Homo: ‘In the midst of the agony of a headache which lasted three days, accompanied by violent nausea, I was possessed of a most singular dialectical cle
arness, and in absolutely cold blood I then thought through matters, for which, in my healthier moments, I am not enough of a climber, not sufficiently supple, not sufficiently cold.’

  Nietzsche’s commitment to self-discipline even led him to praise Christianity. It might be a ‘curse’, a ‘depravity’, but by making us hate ourselves, it gave us the incentive to strive for something bigger. Nietzsche praised Christian architecture for its depth and meaning; it ‘referred to a higher order of things’, unlike modern architecture, which simply aspired to look good. Christianity agitated; it poked and prodded. In its absence, Nietzsche feared, we would retreat into apathy and passivity. ‘Are we not,’ he fretted, ‘with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand?’

  In this complaint there is a note of anxiety not usually found in Nietzsche’s works. The worry stemmed from the close link between confidence and a dangerously easy-going sense of security. What if this was the flaw in his project? What if, instead of committing people to an endless quest for self-improvement, confidence became a source of complacency, even laziness?

  Nietzsche presented this possibility as a very real threat, declaring in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that it was ‘the greatest danger to the whole human future’. But when Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s mouthpiece in that tale, warns a crowd waiting in a market square that they need to stop being happy and recover their contempt for themselves, instead of listening raptly, the people laugh at him. Of course they do. Why wouldn’t they want to be happy? The very notion seems ridiculous.

  Now that we live in a culture obsessed with confidence, has Nietzsche’s vision of complacency come to pass? Strangely, it has not. Confidence has become a far more significant factor in people’s lives, but that has not encouraged people to sit back and feel good about themselves. Instead, both confidence and well-being are valued as aids to productivity.

  Take mindfulness: intended to bring inner peace, but popularised by apps that deliver it in minutes, like a double espresso for the soul, and cited by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as an essential pick-me-up in their world-conquering schedules. Nietzsche feared life would become easy and placid, and people would work ‘only as a pastime’. Instead, the line between work and leisure has blurred in work’s favour, and the pressure to perform has crept into every area of life. Far from being eliminated, change is now a requirement: it’s so all-encompassing, the only option is to be ‘good in change’. Nietzsche complained that people were turning to sand; we, his descendants, live on shifting sand.

  The alternately husky and booming voices of Jemima and Dave played out into the waiting room. Every few minutes, the same thirty-second montage of Jemima’s throaty laugh and Dave’s stock phrases (‘You don’t have to be crazy – but it helps!’) cycled by. Now they were chatting Prince Philip’s Gaffe of the Week, next up was The Biscuit You Couldn’t Live Without – it was that sort of local breakfast show.

  It was 7.20 a.m. and Ellie and Nadine were scheduled for 7.30. They’d been picked up in a taxi at 6.30, by which time Ellie had already come close to vomiting with nerves. ‘It’s like, I feel fine in my head,’ Ellie told Rose, who had got up to wave them off. ‘But my body—’

  ‘Your body, your body’s telling you no?’ Rose had grinned.

  ‘What it’s telling me can only be expressed in expletives.’

  Now Ellie was feeling it in her jaw, as if her back teeth had been clamped together. The waiting room was a shabby, windowless box with a water cooler and a few magazines. She picked one up and stared at it uncomprehendingly.

  ‘You sleep?’ Nadine asked.

  ‘Not at all. Did you?’

  ‘A tiny bit. I had the exam dream.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘I’m at school, always, and late and I try and get a taxi, and then things get all David Lynch.’

  ‘I was basically just lying in bed talking to myself. I don’t think I’ve felt this nervous since A-Levels. Or maybe my Grade Five Trumpet.’

  ‘You practised again, yeah?’

  Ellie nodded numbly. ‘I got Justin to listen to me.’

  ‘What the pros reckon is: say one thing, one thing only, and keep repeating it. Like with a magazine, you know the big quotes embedded in the article that people see first? You wanna plan what those are in advance.’ Nadine had been a godsend at the Badger interview, stepping in and summarising Ellie’s waffling at the end of each answer. ‘Wanna practise now?’

  ‘No, I’ll jinx it. Are you nervous?’

  ‘Mainly tired.’

  ‘I still can’t believe they’re letting us on the radio. We could say anything for God’s sake. It’s ridiculous, really.’

  ‘Oooooh, I love a Mint Club!’ Dave growled passionately. ‘And so does Gabe on his way to work. I’m with you all the way, Gabe!’

  ‘I want to step in and speak up,’ husked Jemima. ‘For the humble Digestive.’

  ‘Digestive?! You’re having a laugh!’

  ‘Okay, ladies, are we ready?’ Gareth, a skinny, tanned producer, sprang into the waiting room. ‘It’s about that time. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Ellie shivered.

  ‘Can we leave our stuff?’ said Nadine.

  ‘Oh, totally. Just leave it there. Becky sees everyone that comes in and out.’ He held the door open, sparkling with what seemed to be genuine enthusiasm. ‘Here we go!’

  They shuffled out, exchanging a wide-eyed look.

  ‘Now you get the whole backstage tour!’ Gareth led the way down the uncarpeted stairs and along a bunker-like corridor. ‘“Glamorous”, eh?’

  ‘Huh,’ Ellie tried a polite laugh.

  They turned into a small, cramped room, with a glass wall. Beyond it were a reassuringly scruffy Jemima and Dave, who gave a cheery wave.

  ‘So you’re going to head in in one minute, okay? Do you need any water?’

  They shook their heads. Ellie turned and gave Nadine an undoubtedly mad-looking smile.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Nadine, through her nose.

  ‘I know. Why did we agree to this?’

  ‘Okay, you’re going to head in with this jingle.’ Gareth seized the door handle. ‘Knock ’em dead, ladies! You’ll be great!’

  They stepped into the soft, brightly lit cupboard, taking their places at one side of a wooden table.

  ‘Welcome to the madhouse!’ Dave boomed.

  ‘Don’t mind him!’ Jemima gave a crinkly grin.

  Gareth helped them into their headphones, and they gathered round a single mic. Ellie stared at the table, jaw clenched as though it were the vital pin preventing her body from exploding.

  ‘We’ve been joined by two local students this morning,’ Dave teed off. ‘Sorry to wake you so early, girls! Or I say two students, but one of them’s been banned from sitting her exams, is that right, Eleanor?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Ellie brightly.

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Well, I began a protest about sexism on campus, along with my friend Nadine here.’

  Ellie looked at Nadine, who waited a fraction too long to speak. ‘Hi—’

  ‘Sexism on campus?’ Jemima dived in. ‘Are girls getting worse marks than boys?’

  ‘No, actually, this was about the way that girls are represented. It was a protest against objectification and casual sexism, sparked by a poster for a uni event featuring an FHM-style picture of a girl in a g-string. We saw it and thought, “We’re sick of that kind of tedious sexism.”’

  ‘Feel like we’ve time-travelled back to the Seventies here,’ said Jemima. ‘Hasn’t this all been said before?’

  ‘Yes, you’re totally right,’ replied Ellie. ‘It’s a good question. Given that we’re in this age of supposed equality and girls can do anything they want, why is it that in our universities, the way a lot of students represent and talk about women feels like we’ve stepped back in time? How has that happened? This campaign was about drawing attentio
n to that fact, and telling people that they don’t have to accept it.’

  ‘I mean, I didn’t go to university,’ shrugged Jemima. ‘But when I first started in radio there were a lot of, shall we say, “blue” jokes around backstage. At the end of the day, though, it was harmless. Is there a danger you’re taking it all a bit too seriously?’

  ‘Well, I think that’s part of the trap.’ Ellie met Jemima’s gaze. ‘It’s ironic, it’s a big joke, and so we’re supposed to be cool about it. In fact, if we’re not cool about it, we’re joyless and we hate fun or we hate sex. But actually we don’t.’

  ‘We-e-ell,’ Dave guffawed. ‘Who does?’

  ‘Steady on, Dave!’ hammed Jemima.

  ‘And why should we be cool about it? At what point does this stop being a joke and start being the standard way of talking and thinking about women? I don’t want to live and study in a place where we’re supposed to accept that. I want to feel like our generation is moving forward, not backward.’

  ‘So tell us what you did,’ said Dave.

  ‘We put slogans on posters that we thought perpetuated this attitude. Slogans like “At Uni I Learned My Body Was My Only Asset”—’

  ‘“Women Have Pubes”,’ Nadine chipped in.

  Dave reeled. ‘Bit early for that!’

  ‘And the campaign got a lot of support,’ Ellie pressed on.

  ‘Though haven’t you been criticised by other girls at your university?’ Jemima looked at her notes. ‘I understand some think you’re not respecting their choices.’

  ‘Well.’ Ellie took a breath. ‘Everybody has free choice. I’m not trying to tell other women what to do. But I do take issue with a kind of diluted, commercial version of feminism, which tells people: feeling good about yourself, that’s feminism. Or having great hair, that’s being strong. Proponents of that kind of “strong hair” feminism tend to react badly whenever anyone brings up anything vaguely political. Because it’s not very feel-good. I’m not saying I want people to feel bad or have bad hair, I’m just saying we can get sucked into the idea that what really matters is an individual sense of being on top, which very often boils down to being attractive. I don’t want to be told that the only way I can be powerful is to be sexy. I can be sexy on my own time – or not, you know. The point is: that isn’t all that we’re here to do. Especially at uni.’