The house lights were down as I slipped into the stalls. The theatre was packed and I waved away an usher with a torch, signalling that I was only staying five minutes. I had a ticket, so they couldn’t throw me out, but hopefully I’d get away with standing at the back. There was a stifled cheer and a half-hearted round of applause as Alice walked onstage: they weren’t here to see her.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have a very special guest here this evening …’

The audience erupted with laughter as first a leg, and then an arm, poked out from the wings; as Alice turned around to see what was happening, they were just as quickly withdrawn. After it had happened a second time, she realised what was going on, laughed and abandoned all attempts at speech-making.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Jeremy Gill.’

Gill emerged to wild applause and a standing ovation. Hugging Alice as if they were old friends who hadn’t met for years, he took over the presentation, making a flawless, touching speech about how much Cork meant to him and how grateful he was, and would always be, to the city that was the first place to give him a prize, which had allowed him to be nominated for a short film Oscar and that although that shower over in Hollywood hadn’t taken much notice back then they’d seen the error of their ways later. More thunderous applause. Gill ran his hand through his hair and shook his head like he was in a shampoo ad. Without a flicker of nerves, he held the crowd captive and docile. Looking around, I was reminded of those photos of 1950s cinema audiences wearing 3D glasses.

Alice quizzed Gill on his new film (getting its first showing in Ireland tonight and he couldn’t be happier that it was happening here and there’d be a Dublin premiere later, but the first showing in Ireland was here and that was really important to him). Throwing in the thing about Dublin was pure genius, appealing to the Cork/Dublin rivalry and superiority complex. I thought back to what Sarah-Jane had said, and on my own encounter with him, how he’d been with the ‘most boring woman in the world’, whoever she was: all chat to her until he’d had enough and walked away. Gill seemed to have the extraordinary ability to be whoever he needed to be in any given situation; and that tallied with what Aifric Sheehan and Colm O’Donnell had said: a groper, or a pervert, by their accounts – yet, according to Aifric, Deirdre had experienced a very different side of Gill.