Confidence

by Rowland Manthorpe

‘Sure, you’re great. Would you like some mango?’

  ‘No, no thanks.’ Ellie brushed mangoes aside. ‘I need . . .’ she looked at the cathedral tower, trying to conjure what she needed with her hands.

  ‘Music?’ Oscar suggested.

  ‘Yes!’ She was so relieved to know just what it was. ‘Yes, that’s it.’

  ‘Okay, well, we’ve got to get back to the library.’ Giles hitched a tote bag of oranges over his shoulder. ‘But you guys have a lovely time with the music.’

  Ellie shook her head and smiled at him. She hadn’t seen Giles for so long and he was amazing, he was the one of the nicest people she’d ever known. And Maggie – Maggie had been such an incredible friend to her, even when she’d been antisocial and difficult, Maggie didn’t care because she was awesome and beautiful. Ellie didn’t want to leave them. Perhaps she should go to the library too. She could lie under a quiet table, thinking . . . but a claustrophobic feeling warned her it would be too hectic, too crowded, it might ruin everything.

  Before Ellie could express her thoughts, Maggie and Giles had wheeled away their bicycles. Bicycles were amazing, with their two wheels and their chain, the way they merged with your body and became something else, they were almost alive, you could almost think that a bicycle had a soul, the way this town had a soul, the way every single person they passed had a soul, and their own complete world, it could almost make you cry, it made you want to reach out to them and tell them that you saw, you knew, you knew exactly how it felt – they were alive, and you were alive too, and it was overwhelming that that could be the case, it made you want to stop and run your hands over the stones of buildings and wonder, were they alive, did they feel when you touched the surface of the sandstone, ridged and rough, and pressed your cheek against it, did the stone know that you were feeling the stone, and the stone – could it be – how could it not be – feeling you?

  For a while, they watched a dog tied up outside a shop, tiny body quivering, sentient and incredible.

  Before or after that, they sat back to back on the cathedral wall, watching all the people pass by, taking turns to hum and feel the vibrations.

  At the same time, Ellie laid her head on Oscar’s lap and stared at the sky.

  ‘I forgot the music,’ she told him, dreamily. ‘I forgot.’

  ‘The music,’ murmured Oscar. he looked down at her, his face funny and heartrending and perfect.

  As Ellie inhaled, she was struck by a wonderful idea. ‘The Shackle. There’s a jukebox.’

  There must have been a period between that thought and being in the Shackle’s car park, hit by the exceptional colours of cars and the sticky look that tarmac got in the heat. They were lying on the ground getting a better sense of where the tarmac was at when Ellie spotted Charlie beyond the bunting. He leaned against the wall, expression somehow bent in on itself. Ellie froze for a second, worried that talking to Charlie might steer them into turbulence, when what she wanted was serene, microscopic calm. But he looked so lost, scratching at the lichen on the wall, trying to untangle himself, and she felt certain that her tidal wave of happiness could wash any worries away.

  ‘Charlie,’ she whispered, grinning, as she crawled on her belly across the tarmac. ‘Chaa-a-ar-lie.’

  —

  The enormous eyes that unexpectedly popped over the Shackle wall looked insane. It took a moment for Charlie to realise that they belonged to Ellie. She seemed to be conjuring with his name, and some bloke with a Mohican was sprawled on the ground behind her.

  ‘Um—’ Charlie stuttered.

  ‘Hi!’ She beamed. ‘Charlie! Amazing.’

  ‘Are you on drugs?’ he asked, and immediately wanted to punch himself in the face.

  ‘Yes,’ she said happily.

  Charlie’s surprise quickly turned to bitterness. Literally everyone at uni was having a better time than him. Even the poster girl for hating on uni was having a more authentic university experience than Charlie had ever had.

  ‘Come in to the Shackle and listen to music.’ She reached through the fence and nipped at his elbow.

  ‘I’m kind of on my way . . .’ Charlie tailed off, looking down the street towards Sara’s house.

  ‘I really want to talk to you,’ said Ellie, eyes like planets.

  ‘Really?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘I have to tell you. You started it all. You splashed me, then I wrote about what an arsehole you were, and it started everything!’

  ‘Right,’ said Charlie dubiously. He wasn’t really in the mood to be humouring fucked people while they made incomprehensible but obscurely cutting remarks at him. On the other hand, further lingering on the street in a state of emotional paralysis didn’t appeal either.

  ‘Come on!’ She was already up, pulling Oscar to his feet. They nuzzled at each other’s necks and shoulders until Charlie had to avert his eyes. Honestly, he thought, get a room.

  ‘It’s okay, Charlie.’ Suddenly, Ellie was stroking his cheek, face almost touching his. He looked into her eyes for a moment, then stepped back awkwardly, casting a confused glance at Oscar, who watched hazily, betraying no sign of discomfort. ‘Don’t worry, everything’s great.’

  The pair of them were making Charlie paranoid. Maybe they’d offer him drugs – a prospect both worrying and appealing.

  Before he could take a firm stand against it, Ellie had led him into the Shackle. The same massive guy was behind the bar, this time wearing a wife-beater. One of the old-man regulars was perched on his stool. He greeted the new arrivals with a bemused nod.

  ‘Rose!’ Ellie hugged Rose like an armful of pick-a-sticks. ‘I love you! I know I’m ridiculous but it’s true, you know, and I should tell you more often.’

  Oscar began prodding at the jukebox, oblivious to anything but its red and yellow lights. He was probably the kind of person that hung round the DJ at parties, Charlie thought, suggesting tracks and making inaudible technical adjustments.

  ‘Hello, gentlemen.’ Rose eyed Oscar and Charlie, apparently unable to decide which she disliked most. ‘What is this – double-act date rape? Has she been Rohypnoled?’

  ‘I’ve got no part in this,’ Charlie told Rose. ‘Can I have a pint?’

  ‘Aren’t you barred?’

  ‘Oy oy,’ the regular chipped in.

  ‘Please, no bars,’ said Michael wearily. ‘Be friendly to customers, Rosie. Show them smile.’

  Prince’s ‘Kiss’ leapt into the empty room. Ellie threw up her hands and circled the blue chair, tapping it and jerking arrhythmically.

  ‘So how’s it going in the boy band, Charles?’ Rose poured a Fosters. If possible, Charlie thought, she looked even paler and more rake-like than she had a few weeks ago; so terrible, in fact, that it would be offensive for him to put up a good face.

  ‘To be honest,’ he admitted, ‘badly.’

  ‘Album sales down?’ Rose sat the pint in front of him. He stared at it glumly. An encouraging nod from Michael prompted Rose to continue, ‘What’s the problem then?’

  Even this frosty invitation was enough for Charlie to unburden himself. Surely Rose of all people could understand misery. ‘Everything. I’m cocking everything up. I’ve ruined my chance to have a business. My marks are terrible. I’m even starting to wonder if I did the right thing about Sara.’

  ‘She work here?’ said the regular.

  ‘Shut up, Steve!’ snapped Rose. ‘The one you ditched? I thought you didn’t like her.’ She caught sight of Ellie and Oscar, who were entwined in the corner by the jukebox, kissing each other’s faces. ‘Oh my Christ. What the fuck?’

  ‘No, I—’ Charlie broke off at Rose’s shocked expression. ‘What is it? Is she still with . . . Justin?’

  ‘Technically, yes.’

  Steve tutted and shook his head.

  ‘You’re one to talk, you cheating bastard.’ Rose shut him down with sudden venom.

  ‘I’m so confused.’ Charlie was anxious to steer them back to the subject at hand. ‘I j
ust don’t know what to do.’

  Michael leaned across the bar gravely. ‘You have to follow heart.’

  Charlie nodded in agreement. ‘But it’s complicated. I didn’t think it would be like this. I miss Sara.’

  ‘No one told you?’ Rose yanked open the steaming dishwasher.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being single’s shit.’

  ‘Don’t know about that.’ Steve puffed out his lips and rolled his eyes, vaguely invoking the ol’ ball and chain.

  Rose shot him a disgusted look.

  ‘Ro-sie,’ he sang, mock-romantically. ‘Ro-sie. Give me your answer do-o-o-o-o-o.’

  ‘But is it right to commit?’ Charlie focused on Michael. ‘Is that fair on her? Is it fair on me?’

  ‘I’m half cra-a-azy.’ Steve jumped up, sidestepping with surprising lightness. Rose rolled her eyes, half smiling. ‘Over the love of yo-o-o-ou.’

  ‘You love her?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ Charlie rubbed his eyes. ‘I just thought . . . I thought I was someone else. Someone better.’

  Steve had waltzed his way behind the bar. ‘It won’t be a sty-lish marriage—’

  Suddenly irritated, Rose shoved Steve back towards his stool. ‘Michael, don’t you have to do the stocktake?’

  ‘Ah.’ Michael nodded and headed for the back door, pausing to impart sagely to Charlie: ‘Remember, follow heart.’

  ‘Thanks, mate.’

  ‘Look, Charles.’ Rose picked up her Diet Coke. ‘It’s not your fault you thought you were better. That’s the burden of poshhood. They tell you you can do everything, regardless of your actual talent or ability.’

  ‘Oh, not this again,’ Charlie sighed. ‘I’m not even that posh. I mean, seriously. You should see some of the people who were at my school.’

  ‘Great argument.’

  Limbs untangled, Ellie and Oscar were shuffling their way towards the bar, vaguely in time to Bob Marley.

  ‘Okay,’ Charlie conceded. ‘But honestly, I bet there’s almost no difference between my parents and yours. Neither of mine went to uni. The only books they have are by Delia Smith.’

  ‘All right. Pop quiz. What do you call a body warmer?’

  ‘A body warmer?’ Charlie frowned in confusion. ‘I give up.’

  ‘You call it fucking gilet, don’t you.’

  Charlie rolled his eyes.

  ‘What do you call your evening meal?’

  Charlie waited.

  ‘You call it fucking supper, don’t you.’

  ‘But what’s your point? You can’t hate for me knowing the word “gilet”.’

  ‘I don’t hate you, Charles.’ Rose started fishing out glasses and stacking them on the shelves. ‘I prefer you in a crisis actually. Being deeply troubled really brings out the best in you.’

  ‘Great.’ Charlie ran his hands through his hair. This advice session was giving him problems he wasn’t even aware he had. He longed to go home and sink into a Scrubs stupor.

  ‘Rose.’ Ellie steadied herself on Charlie’s shoulder, as Oscar edged onto a stool. ‘Are you giving him a hard time? Remember, Charlie’s sensitive.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘You are,’ Ellie corrected Charlie. ‘But don’t mind Rose, she doesn’t mean it.’

  Rose snorted.

  ‘The thing with Rose is, let me tell you something, do you know what it is?’ Ellie leaned very close to whisper to Charlie, crazy-eyed and compelling. ‘Do you know what’s she done?’

  ‘What?’ Rose cocked an ear.

  ‘All her amazingness and talent.’ Ellie stretched out her fingers, leaning back. ‘It’s going in. Like an X-woman who hasn’t figured out her power yet and keeps setting fire to people.’

  ‘Okay.’ Charlie frowned, confused.

  ‘Except she’s setting herself on fire.’ With a delighted smile, Ellie concluded, ‘See! That’s why she’s anorexic!’

  In the awkward pause that followed, Oscar tapped along to ‘Is This Love’, rolling his shoulders luxuriously.

  Charlie stared down into his pint, wishing he could disappear.

  Rose turned to face the spirits, patting the worktop in search of some activity. Even Steve seemed to realise something had gone wrong. He got up and stepped behind the bar, reaching an arm round Rose’s shoulders.

  Ellie folded her arms and laid her head on the bar, smiling blissfully. ‘How are you doing?’ she asked Oscar.

  Charlie couldn’t see the response. He tried to drink but the sip sat in his mouth, refusing to go down. The Shackle was too horrible. It felt like a dream in which he’d done something awful and couldn’t quite pin down what it was.

  ‘Me too,’ murmured Ellie. ‘Mmmmmmmm.’

  17

  Higher Men

  Greatness, for Nietzsche, was defined on a personal level, by great people and their great works. ‘Higher men’, he called these heroes, describing them as ‘philosophers of the future’ and ‘adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world called “man”’. (Although not as Übermensch, sometimes translated as ‘superman’. This term was taken up by the Nazis, but, one brief mention aside, it only appears in Nietzsche’s highly poetic Thus Spoke Zarathustra.)

  The higher men were the people Nietzsche wrote for and wished to herald, but identifying them wasn’t always simple. Nietzsche cites Goethe and Beethoven, Napoleon until power corrupted him, plus of course himself; after that the list peters out, leaving the higher men as a nameless elite, like saints or legends in their inhuman vagueness.

  Nevertheless, Nietzsche tended to depict these legends as members of some earnest, self-important club (a boys’ club, naturally). He was imagining himself with friends, equals, although even if he knew their names and addresses he wouldn’t be able to invite them round, because higher men were, like him, solitary by nature. Other features of these strong, imperious’ individuals include their creativity, judgement and robust good health, again like Nietzsche, who spent almost his entire adult life afflicted by one ailment or another, yet considered himself ‘intrinsically sound’. Most importantly, the higher men are supremely confident, with all that entails. They are a glorified self-portrait, Nietzsche as he wished to be and, in his final madness, how he believed he was.

  What, then, of the lower men, the not-quite-confident-enough who fail in some way to match up to this standard? ‘Good-natured herd animals,’ sneered Nietzsche. For ‘mediocre’ public opinion he had nothing but disdain: ‘Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them.’

  Nietzsche was that rare thing, an unabashed elitist. He simply did not believe that equality was a good thing, because such ‘levelling down’ interfered with the development of higher men. In higher education, for instance, ‘democratisation’ prevented the truly exceptional from realising their potential, and gave the ‘lower types’ expectations they could never hope to fulfil. As always, Nietzsche put it in the strongest terms: ‘If one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.’

  Nietzsche’s two-tier vision of society is one of the most difficult parts of his philosophy for modern readers to come to terms with. But you could say that, when it comes to confidence, this is exactly what we’ve ended up with: a select cadre of confident individuals at the top, with a larger mass of extras making up the crowd. For all the democratic talk that surrounds it, confidence maps disconcertingly well onto traditional class and gender divisions. You can see it in any conversation: some people are happier to speak and more willing to believe they will be listened to, and invariably, they are the people with more power. In public-speaking training, they talk about ‘the right to voice’ – the theory that you’ll never speak well unless you believe you should be speaking. So is the answer just to believe? Maybe – but that kind of positive thinking ignores the fact that, most of the time, there’s a reason some people believe their voice should be the one being heard, while others never do.
r />   Yet confidence is persistently difficult to systematise. It might be the gift of privilege, but it’s also the unruly force which enables less entitled people to break away from a typical trajectory and excel. It’s hierarchical, yet also ‘aspirational’. And it was in this spirit of aspiration that Nietzsche wrote, at a time when confidence was more subversive, less familiar than it is today. Nietzsche was never on the side of the establishment. His version of confidence was wild, ungovernable and free.

  Nietzsche advocated inequality more as an attitude than a political policy. A sense of superiority, of being the best, was for him a necessary part of greatness, especially the kind of creative greatness he admired the most. It sounds plausible, harmless even, until you consider the real-life implications of such an attitude. There were two kinds of people in the world, Nietzsche told his readers: you, in pursuit of your vision, and everyone else, whom you should treat as tools for your use.

  Charlie left the Shackle like Scrooge after a vision of Christmas Future. What on earth had he been thinking asking for advice from that bunch of fruit loops? Ellie was all over the place (who took drugs right before exams?) and Rose was clearly hanging on to sanity by her fingernails.

  Charlie had to decide one way or the other about Sara. He considered calling a friend, but he knew in advance what they’d say. Ben: ‘Get back together.’ Lucas: ‘Don’t.’ Alistair: ‘Fuck off and stop bothering me.’ There was nothing for it: he had to figure it out for himself. He browsed the newsagents, hoping it would aid his process.

  As Charlie stared at the tins of fruit, two inalienable truths became apparent. First, he needed Sara. He was miserable, lonely and desperately unproductive without her. Second, when exams were over, there was no way he’d still want to be with her (although she would be incredibly helpful when he was looking for jobs). In spite of all that had gone wrong, Charlie wasn’t willing to give up his vision of the person he might become. He’d simply realised that he couldn’t be that person until finals were taken care of and he’d escaped this town for ever.

  What he had to do, Charlie realised, was be completely honest with her about how he felt. That was always the answer in the end. He picked up a Curly-Wurly (Sara’s nostalgic comfort food) and jelly sweets in the shape of rings: a gesture, a joke really.