Hold on – what was she justifying here? Thoroughly confused, Ellie considered calling Justin, but she was beginning to grasp the fact that she had for some time now been treating him like shit: waking him at 3 a.m. to ‘help her think’ was reaching Stalinist levels of tyranny. And what about Nadine? Her mind slowly paced back over yesterday, the day before Nadine’s first exam, spent chaperoning Ellie to unnecessary TV appearances. She winced.
As a thought experiment, Ellie decided she would go to the exam. A whole new raft of problems fell into her lap. In the fluorescent light of the ward, she saw several things very clearly. She was: a) completely unprepared, having done approximately three days of revision in the entire semester; and b) not even sure where the exam was taking place or what her exam number was. These observations led her to the highly credible prediction that she would do very badly indeed. In the best of all possibly scenarios, she would brush mediocrity with her fingertips. Crushing failure was a far more likely outcome.
Ellie settled her head on the edge of Rose’s stiff bed sheet and closed her eyes.
Finalists milled outside Nicholson Hall like bees kept from the hive. The morning was unseasonably cold. Friends talked past one another; a boy mumbled Descartes quotes over and over; another counted pens in his pocket.
‘My brain is empty,’ someone said, shivering.
‘The emptiness is good,’ intoned her friend. ‘The emptiness is awaiting a question.’
After an age, but still too soon, the hall doors opened. They streamed in, as invigilators called out directions, ushering them into sections according to paper. Invigilators were always wrong somehow, too short or too hairy; they couldn’t live up to the momentousness of the occasion.
Charlie sat down at the edge of Italian Politics and cast his eyes up to the beamed ceiling.
‘This is Politics Paper Sixteen: Contemporary Italian Politics,’ the dude in his section announced. ‘If you need extra paper . . .’
It was all exactly as he’d seen it; he knew what the page would say without even turning it over.
Ellie ran in and sat at the desk next to Charlie, immediately dropping her pens. She bent to pick them up, casting a jittery glance at him. Charlie, she thought. I saw you somewhere. An obscure feeling of shame blinked in her mind like a signal from another planet.
Charlie averted his eyes. For no reason, he was racked with guilt about splashing her. Even though it was only a stupid joke. Even though he had apologised and bought her abortion pills. Even though she was mental last time he saw her.
‘This is Philosophy Paper Eight: Theories of Epistemology,’ the woman in Ellie’s section announced. ‘If you need extra paper . . .’
Out of nowhere, Ellie remembered a conversation they’d had in the second year about how much she’d liked Justin.
You knew you didn’t really like him, she scolded herself. You knew it then.
‘You may now turn over your papers,’ an invigilator said. ‘And begin.’
19
All Nietzscheans Now
Nietzsche described the way confidence actually works, not the way we wish it did. He identified its difficulties, dangers and possibilities – and embraced them all. He lived his philosophy until, in the end, it proved unliveable.
We, his philosophical heirs, have made the same pact, with the same possible consequences. In our case, however, it is not a choice, but a destiny. We live in a world of enforced confidence, and we are obliged to love it as if we chose it. There is no escape, no opting out of confidence, not if you want to ‘be all that you can be’. (And if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?) Either we have to be confident, or we have to be working on becoming confident. Whether we like it or not, we have to be Nietzscheans now.
How did this happen? Seeing the process as it was starting, Nietzsche named secularism as the driving force, but at best that is only one half of the equation. Greater responsibility must lie with our economic system, and the demands it places on us for flexibility and endless movement. Confidence is a capitalist virtue, and as we become more capitalist, so our dependence on it increases.
In his scattered remarks on economics, Nietzsche was consistently hostile towards capitalism. Seen from this perspective, however, he could rank among its most powerful advocates, because of the way in which he gives dynamism and change an almost transcendent quality. He even approved of inequality, for the familiar capitalist reason that it promoted striving and achievement.
Why might confidence and capitalism be particularly compatible? To understand, it helps to compare confidence with a rather more medieval virtue: honour. For much of the Middle Ages and beyond, honour was at least as important to people as confidence is now. You would pay on time, go to war, estrange yourself from family members, give up the person you loved and shun friends, all for the sake of this intangible quality and its system of social rewards and punishments.
Honour declined because it was incompatible with capitalism. It was the glue that held pre-modern society together, but its insistence on everyone knowing their place was too sticky for capitalism, which preferred mobile individuals maximising their competitive advantage. (This is one of those instances when it makes sense to speak of grand historical forces as if they had personalities.) Confidence, with its love of flexibility and shapeshifting, was far more appropriate to the new system.
The history of confidence makes the connection with capitalism clear. Emerging as a word in English in the fifteenth century, it was a Godly quality among the first capitalists, the Protestants of pre-Reformation Europe. Confidence first came to prominence in nineteenth-century America, during the era of mass urban migration. For writers in this confusing time, confidence was the quality that symbolised the death of small-town communities and their replacement by a society of strangers. Herman Melville wrote a book about it, The Confidence-Man, in which a man who is ‘in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger’ tours a riverboat asking passengers to trust him, then conning them out of their money. The popular obsession with ‘confidence tricksters’ in newspapers of the time warned of the deceptiveness of confidence, while at the same time illustrating its desirability: it was the trait of scammers and con men, but it was also the quality that could make you rich.
Fast-forward one hundred and fifty years, and confidence is not simply accepted, but held in the highest regard. This shift has been especially noticeable in the last thirty years; not coincidentally, in the same period, life has become correspondingly more capitalistic. The big corporations of fifty years ago have been broken up, downsized, delayered (the shift from bureaucracy, literally ‘rule by desk’, to hot-desking). Employment is less stable and ‘careers’ are a thing of the past. The market intrudes into every arena, not least education, so that if you go to university, you start off working life with tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of debt to recover. And so the existence Nietzsche chose for himself – impoverished, itinerant, uncertain – becomes, simply, the way we live now.
When Charlie arrived, Ellie was already perched at the end of the bar with a goblet of red wine. In the split second before saying hello, he wondered how he should greet her. A high five seemed ridiculous; on the other hand, she didn’t exactly scream Hug me. In the event, Ellie got up and pecked his cheek.
‘I’m afraid I started without you.’
‘That’s all right.’ Charlie took off his raincoat. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to wait in the freezing cold until I arrived.’
‘No, I mean I had one before this.’ She nodded at her wine.
‘Ah. No problem. I’d better order then.’
As he turned towards the barman, Charlie acknowledged, but resisted, his impulse to institute some edgy, hyper-banterous style of conversation. He didn’t want an exhausting evening of quipping past one another, uni-style. Charlie was completely convinced by the maturity and rightness of this approach; the only remaining problem was he wasn’t sure how else to talk.
He’d bumped into Ellie on the St
rand around 1 a.m., hood up, arms clamped against the wind. Charlie was on his way back to Lucas’s, enjoying a solitary venture in the breathless city night, a fleeting sense of urbanity compounded by his knowledge of which bus to get. The meeting was brief – his bus arrived in about a minute – and felt unfinished. Not pleasant exactly, enervating in some ways, but nonetheless interesting. As Charlie jumped onto the bus, he’d suggested a beer next time he was down. Then, two weeks later, as part of his new regime of following things through (facilitated by his freshly emptied schedule), he’d arranged it.
‘So how are you doing?’ he began, consciously not minding that he didn’t have some hilarious anecdote on hand to kick off.
‘Do you know what? Not that bad actually.’ Ellie was wearing an old leather coat and black eyeliner, a kind of messy glamour with an emphasis on the messy. ‘I mean, hopeless on the work front obviously. I’m waitressing. And sometimes I temp in a hospital. At the end of the day I usually feel like downing half a bottle of vodka, and I think it’s fair to say that I’m on the verge of having a drinking problem. On the up side, I have a financial crisis to blame, so that’s great!’
‘That’s true.’ Charlie nodded to the barman. ‘Kronenbourg, please.’ Ellie seemed a little keyed up, he thought, as though she’d been working up conversation pieces while she waited.
‘How did we not notice it was happening?’ Ellie shook her head. ‘I certainly didn’t. There we were, getting down to our finals. Everyone must have been thinking, “Best not tell them they’re fucked – they’ll find out soon enough.” Although’ – she shifted, crossing her legs – ‘I quite like being termed the “lost generation”, rather than like the “Facebook generation” or whatever. Finally I’m on trend. If I’m authentically lost then I must be doing it right.’
Charlie smiled, subtly deflecting her nervous energy.
She sipped her wine. ‘Are you trying not to ask what I got?’
‘What you got?’ he said, surprised. ‘No, I wasn’t at all.’
‘Well, I got a two:two.’
His expression lifted. ‘As a matter of fact, so did I.’
‘No!’ She looked pleased. ‘I thought I was the only one!’
‘It’s an elite group. Lucas is in. What was your average?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Fifty-nine.’
‘Oooh, unlucky.’
‘I know.’
‘I wasn’t even close. I don’t know if that feels better or worse.’
Charlie’s pint arrived and he handed a fiver to the barman, who was scattering charisma all over the place – probably an actor, Charlie thought.
‘So, how are things with you then?’ Ellie took a breath, settling a little. ‘Is real life everything you’d hoped?’
‘Well,’ Charlie considered. ‘I’m living at home.’
‘I thought you looked sort of country-ish.’
‘Yeah, there’s not much call for mirrors in deepest Sussex.’
‘I don’t mean it badly.’
‘No, I know. I’ve also got a job, in a manner of speaking: I’m working for my parents at the chocolate factory.’
‘Ah, okay. That’s great. I’m a committed apply-er. Applicant, I mean. It’s like my hobby. I may as well drop them all down a drain. Still. I apply.’
‘In my job you’ve got to be willing to accept bed and board as part payment.’
‘A kind of feudal system.’
‘Yeah. They got a bit . . . screwed in the crash.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Yeah, bit of a disaster.’
‘Not many people know this.’ Ellie leaned in. ‘But the Chinese symbol for “disaster” also means “fucked up the arse”.’
Charlie laughed. Ellie was funny – he caught the thought before it came out.
‘I thought people bought chocolates during recessions though. Isn’t that what they’re always saying? Lipsticks and chocolate or something.’
‘No, I’ve heard that. But they – my parents – were planning on expanding and they remortgaged. And then it turns out people don’t buy as many chocolates as all that.’
‘Ah.’
‘That was the first thing I did. Redundancies.’
Ellie’s eyes widened. ‘Oh God.’
‘Not choosing the people or telling them, thank God, but helping my mum sort out all the paperwork and share out the workload . . . mostly to myself. Yay. I do the day-to-day stuff that used to be done by about three people.’
‘Oh. How’s that going?’
‘Mmmm.’ Charlie rubbed his hair, making strands rise with static. ‘It’s a combination of stress and a weird amount of responsibility, and no real skills or experience to deal with it. And boring. It’s also boring.’
‘Ergh.’ Ellie bit her lip sympathetically. ‘At least you’re getting some experience. I feel like even if there were any jobs, which there aren’t, and I got an interview, which I won’t, I’d go in and be like, “Don’t give me a job! Are you crazy? I don’t know anything!”’
‘A few of the people who work in the factory I’ve known since I was a kid.’ Charlie played with a beermat. ‘And then I’ve sort of turned into their boss. But a boss who doesn’t know anything. Can you imagine?’
Ellie winced.
‘They hate me. They despise me. And I get it, I do.’
Ellie fingered the stem of her glass in the pause. ‘Do you ever see anyone in Sussex then?’
‘Well, I just split up with my girlfriend actually.’
‘Oh sorry about that. Was it someone from school?’
‘Um, no.’ He sipped his beer. ‘It was Penny.’
‘Penny Penny? As in, uni Penny?’
‘Yup.’
‘Penny Austin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right. Yeah.’ He watched Ellie struggle to swallow her surprise. Yes, that’s right, he felt like standing up and declaring to the pub. I, Charlie Naughton, had a long-term relationship with Penny Austin. He couldn’t pretend that the admission wasn’t humiliating, but Charlie was determined not to be a traitor. All right, Penny was nuts, but she was also extremely sweet and had been an incredible support during his summer of self-loathing, and his not-so-magical adventures in the chocolate factory.
‘We started going out during exams,’ he offered, hoping Ellie would read between the lines.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I feel like it might have been more a product of that situation rather than anything else. And because she lives quite near me and I was having a shit time, it ended up lasting longer than it perhaps should have.’
‘God, well, I know that feeling.’
‘I’ve made a decision to stay single for a while and stop copping out. Try and get along by myself.’
‘Good decision.’
‘Don’t tell me you’re single.’
Ellie’s eyes meandered up to the soft yellow lights.
‘Thought not.’
‘I’m not exactly not-single, I’m just not exactly single either.’
‘Do you like whoever it is?’ asked Charlie bluntly, empowered by his new independent state.
‘Did you like Penny?’ she returned quickly.
He hesitated. ‘No.’
Ellie gave a single nod. ‘Well. I quite like him.’
‘Like a four.’
‘Like . . .’ Ellie’s head cocked to the side. ‘A generous five. As opposed to what for you?’ She stretched out her hands. ‘How do you signify negative fingers?’
Charlie looked down at the tiled floor, irritated but not sure why. ‘So who are you living with?’
Ellie drained her glass. ‘With this guy, whose name is Dominic – he’s in Nadine’s room while she’s in Ecuador. And with Rose.’
‘Living together, eh?’ Even Charlie could hear the edge in his voice.
‘Yes, as it happens we live in the same house.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘That all right with you, Charlie?’
‘Of course.’ He shook himself. ‘Sorry. How’s Ros
e?’
‘A lot better. She was at home and an outpatient for a while, and just moved down this month. She’s waitressing and applying for uni next year. Still as mad as anything but . . . better.’
‘What’s she going to study?’
‘Philosophy,’ said Ellie. ‘Or French. She can’t decide. It’s funny – I never saw her write an essay all the time we lived together. But she’s got pretty into it. How’s Lucas?’
‘Fine. Wants to go and work in the City.’
Ellie took a moment to process this news. ‘Only Lucas could possibly look at what’s happening and think, “Sounds like the game for me. Pass me the subprime mortgages.” That’s insane.’
‘I kind of agree to be honest.’ Charlie tracked the barman. ‘What do you want to do, if you get the chance?’
‘I don’t know. The closest I came to doing a real job was even more bullshit than my bullshit jobs.’
‘What was it?’
‘I temped at a consultancy. They got us in late at night to call American second-hand car merchants and ask them all these in-depth questions about their business. Most of the time it was just being told to fuck off in a transatlantic context. Sometimes they would talk to me and I didn’t understand half what they said. But I tried to plug it into the spreadsheet. Anyway while I was there, I was chatting to the guy next to me who was full-time, and I was like: “This isn’t it, is it? I mean, consultants don’t just phone people up and hope they’ll get some information, right?” And he was like: “Basically, yeah.” Then they dress it all up in a PowerPoint with a few made-up figures thrown in. It felt like uni group presentations all over again. I mean, I’m sure they’re not all like that, but . . .’
‘So what then?’
‘I dunno.’ She sagged. ‘To be honest I don’t really want to want anything in case I don’t get it. It’s a bit depressing.’ She took a sip of his pint. ‘What do you want? Are you in the chocolate business for life now?’
‘Oh my God, I hope not.’ Charlie rubbed at the edge of the polished wood with his sleeve. ‘I’d like to do something where my main contact isn’t with a tight group of middle-aged women who loathe me. I’d like to have a life. I’d like to actually be in love, not half pretending and lying.’ He looked up. ‘Sorry, is this more of a catch-up than you bargained for?’
Confidence Page 27
