The Best Man's Speech

When Jamie asked Sam to be his best man, Sam said yes before Jamie had even finished the question. They had been friends since they were five, when Jamie had shared his crisps with Sam on the first day of school and Sam had promised to be his friend forever in return. "Of course I'll do the speech," Sam said. "It'll be the best speech Edinburgh has ever heard."

That was in January. The wedding was on the second Saturday in June. Sam had five months to write a speech of five minutes, which seemed like more than enough time. He would start in February, he decided, once things had calmed down at work.

In February, things did not calm down at work. In March, he bought a notebook especially for the speech and wrote SPEECH on the cover in capital letters. In April, he watched seventeen videos called things like "How to Write the Perfect Wedding Speech" and made a list of rules: be funny, be short, don't mention ex-girlfriends, don't drink too much before you start. In May, he looked at the notebook from time to time, the way people look at a gym they have joined but never visited.

On the Saturday before the wedding, he finally opened it. The first page said SPEECH. The rest was empty. Sam made a cup of tea, sat down at the kitchen table and told himself he wasn't getting up until he had written something.

Three hours later, he had written one sentence: "Good evening, everyone." He looked at it for a long time. Then he crossed it out, because it sounded like the beginning of a news program.

The problem, he realized, wasn't that he had nothing to say. It was that he had too much. There was the time Jamie had driven three hundred miles in the middle of the night because Sam's car had broken down outside Newcastle. There was the time they had tried to start a band and played one concert to an audience of four, two of whom were their mothers. There was the summer they had spent picking strawberries in Kent and the winter they had both been heartbroken at the same time. How was he supposed to fit thirty years into five minutes?

By Wednesday, Sam had stopped sleeping properly. He kept imagining the moment: he would stand up, the room would go quiet, a hundred and twenty faces would turn towards him and his mind would go completely blank. Or worse, he would make a joke and nobody would laugh, and Jamie's grandmother would cough in the silence. When his sister phoned, he told her he was thinking of pretending to lose his voice. "You're not going to do that," she said. "You're going to write it tonight, and as soon as you've finished, you're going to read it to me."

So he did. He threw away the rules and the videos and simply wrote down the crisps story, the car story and the band story, and then one more thing he had never told anyone: that on the worst day of his life, when his father had died, Jamie had turned up at his door without saying anything and had stayed for a week. When he read it to his sister, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Don't change a word."

On the day of the wedding, the sun shone over the castle and the bagpipes played and Sam's hands shook so much that he could hardly hold his glass. When the moment came, he stood up, the room went quiet, and for one terrible second his mind went blank, just as he had imagined. Then he looked at Jamie, who winked at him, and he remembered the crisps.

People laughed at the band story. They laughed even more at the car story. When he got to the part about his father, the room went so quiet that he could hear the bagpiper unpacking in the corridor. When he finished, Jamie's grandmother was the first person on her feet.

Later that night, Jamie found him outside, looking at the lights of the city. "You said it would be the best speech Edinburgh had ever heard," Jamie said. "I didn't think you'd actually manage it." Sam laughed. "Neither did I," he said. "Next time you get married, give me a bit more notice."