Before I can manage it, though, the rest of the cast are stomping back into the dressing room, dragging me back out on stage for the curtain call.

I blink into the white light again as the audience claps half-heartedly at us, and then we’re all back in the dressing room together, shouting and laughing and hugging.

If Marek bears me any ill will for turning his gravely serious near-death scene into a ridiculous farce, he doesn’t show it. He squeezes me just as tightly as he does everyone else, gushing about how amazingly the whole thing went, and seeming particularly pleased that several audience members walked out during a flashback in which Scrooge slits a rival drug dealer’s throat with a guitar string.

‘Did you see the looks on their faces?’ he yells. ‘They just couldn’t fucking handle it!’

We all spill out of the Drama Barn into Langwith College bar next door, and as my feet cross the ominously sticky threshold, the déjà vu is humming away stronger than ever. God, I remember this place so well. I can’t count the number of nights I spent in here, feeding my student loan into the pool table, fifty pee at a time.

The bar’s lime-green walls are reverberating to the sound of ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’, and my butterflies-and-dinosaurs theory begins to flounder slightly, because everything starts slotting neatly back into place, exactly as I remember it.

Daphne has disappeared, just like she did all those years ago, and I recall the sharp pang of regret nineteen-year-old me felt as I scanned the bar and couldn’t spot her. Harv turns up and starts forcing sambuca shots on everyone, and then Alice sits down next to me, just as she did first time round.

She’s pink-cheeked, fresh from scrubbing off her stage make-up, and she looks lovely. I watch her down her shot, and wonder if maybe this is where things will really start to change. If maybe this time Daphne won’t show up at the bar at all, and tonight will become what I always imagined it would: me and Alice’s night.

She drops the tiny glass back onto the table and grimaces. ‘Well, thank God that’s over.’

‘What, the shot?’

She laughs. ‘No. The play.’

‘Oh, right. Didn’t you enjoy it?’

‘Yeah, no, I did. It’s just I’ve been so nervous about it for weeks. It’s nice to be able to finally stop worrying about it.’

Alice had a much bigger part in The Carol Revisited than I did – although to be fair, the same could be said for literally every other member of the cast. She was playing the second lead – Marie, Scrooge’s fiery moll – and as I recall, it required a ton of line-learning and late-night rehearsing.

‘You were great,’ I tell her.