For the Record
(Room 12, an hour before the coach locks up. Two laptops, one printed speech, half a cold pizza.)
Suki: It's the best line in the whole speech.
Jamal: It's also the only line we can't source.
Suki: It's on the ministry website. That's a source.
Jamal: It's quoted on the ministry website. I clicked through. It goes to a report from 2011, and the report goes to a survey of forty students at one school in Leeds.
Suki: Forty is a sample.
Jamal: Forty is a class. And it's fifteen years old.
Suki: Nobody in that room is going to check it.
Jamal: Their second speaker checks everything. She asked us for a page number last time. A page number, Suki.
Suki: So what do we say instead? Some students, sometimes, possibly?
Jamal: We say the number we can defend. Twenty-two percent, national, last year.
Suki: Twenty-two percent doesn't make anyone look up.
Jamal: Neither does losing the whole case. If they check that number and it breaks, the judges will stop trusting the rest of our evidence, and the rest of our evidence is good.
(Suki reads the line again, out loud, in her competition voice. It sounds even better out loud.)
Suki: The coach told us to lead with our strongest analysis.
Jamal: She said strongest. She didn't say biggest.
Suki: That's a very small difference.
Jamal: It's the whole difference. Look, if we open with it, we're not making an argument. We're hoping nobody asks.
Suki: And if I cut it, the speech is thirty seconds short.
Jamal: Then we finish with the nurse. She's real, she talked to you for an hour, and you can say her name out loud.
Suki: Fine. Cut it.
Jamal: You okay?
Suki: No. I'm angry, you're right, and those are two separate things. Cut it before I read it again.
(Jamal deletes the line. Neither of them touches the pizza.)
Jamal: For the record, it was a great line.
Suki: For the record, I know.