All About Us - Tom Ellen

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is that nothing – nothing – is playing out the way it did first time around. Obviously, fifteen years ago, I didn’t forget my lines or gawp at Daphne like a creepy oddball, and she didn’t have to go and find me a script or high-five me as I came offstage.

      I have no idea whether any of this matters. But I do remember reading some sci-fi story when I was a kid about a time traveller who crushes a butterfly and ends up killing off the dinosaurs as a result. And if there’s any truth in that logic, then I’m starting to seriously wonder what sort of knock-on effects all these new developments will have.

      But then maybe, I consider, as I stare at my insanely youthful face in the dressing-room mirror, maybe that’s the point of all this. I think back to the attic, which already seems like days ago: didn’t I drunkenly imagine what might have happened if tonight had gone differently? And that old man in the pub. The watch-seller. When he asked me if I would change anything, tonight was one of the memories that flashed into my mind. That strange feeling rushes through me again – the unsettling sense that the old man knew me somehow. I stare down at the watch he gave me, its hands still frozen at one minute to twelve, and make a concerted effort to wrap my brain around what is going on.

      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.

      She shrugs. ‘Thanks. It was pretty fun. But tonight’s what I’ve really been looking forward to.’ She smiles at me for a second before adding: ‘The cast party, I mean.’

      I smile back and find myself wondering if she always imagined this would be our night too.

      She picks up two shots from the tray in front of us and says: ‘Here, come on. Let’s get very, very pissed.’

      I smile and nod, feeling exactly as torn as I did all those years ago; part of me enjoying the feeling of being flirted with by Alice, the other part desperate to see Daphne again.

      We do another grimace-inducing sambuca shot each, and then Alice squeezes my arm and gets up to say hi to somebody else. And as I scan the room again, Daff is suddenly there, right on cue.

      She’s standing at the bar with her best friend, Jamila, and a few of her other mates. She gives me a grin and a wave and then turns back to them.

      Under the bar’s garish strip lighting, I can finally see her face properly, and my heart starts pulsing in my chest. It’s stating the blindingly obvious to say that she looks younger – a little bit redder and rounder in the cheeks – but the really big difference is in the way she carries herself. There’s this lightness to her that I remember being immediately struck by when I first met her – a goofy, playful silliness that I honestly haven’t seen in years.

      Probably because I’ve managed to gradually grind it out of her.

      She’s listening to Jamila tell some story, and as she nods along, she nibbles absent-mindedly at the rim of her plastic pint glass. That’s a trait I remember thinking was a cute little nervous tic, until I later learned it was a tactical ploy to hide her top lip.

      Daff’s always had a weird thing about her top lip. She hates the little scattering of light brown freckles that run across it – which, to be honest, I’ve always thought were really cute. But some boy at her school once teased her about them in Year 8, and it’s stuck with her ever since.

      And now here she comes, walking towards me, smiling awkwardly, and I have to pretend I don’t know any of that. I have to pretend I don’t know anything about her. That she’s some random girl I’ve just met.

      How the hell am I supposed to do this?

      ‘Hey!’ she says. ‘Not-Naked Ben.’

      ‘Not-Naked Daphne. Hi.’

      She pulls out Alice’s chair, and before I can tell her that it’s Alice’s chair, she’s plonked herself down in it. She raises her pint glass to me. ‘Congratulations again on your stellar performance.’

      I hold my hands up and force a laugh. I’m still finding normal conversation with her too much to handle, to be honest. Plus, I’ve become so keenly aware of my tendency to stare that I’m now doing the exact opposite – making barely any eye contact at all. Which is probably just as weird.

      ‘I thought you’d headed off,’ I tell her left shoulder.

      She shakes her head. ‘No, I was supposed to be meeting some friends off campus, but I brought them back here instead.’

      ‘Ah, right. Cool.’

      Alice is now back at the table, holding a tray loaded with pints of snakebite and black. I see her glance pointedly at Daphne as she slides one towards me and then goes off to find a free chair next to Marek down the other end. I feel a twinge of guilt, as well as something else I can’t quite put my finger on. Regret, maybe? But there’s no time to dwell on it, because Daff is leaning back in.

      ‘So is this your thing, then?’ she asks. ‘Do you want to be an actor? Because I have to say, I’m not a hundred per cent sure you’re cut out for the hitman business.’

      ‘You’re right,’ I say, nodding. ‘The best hitmen do traditionally remember to kill their victims.’

      ‘Well, maybe you could be a sort of pacifist hitman,’ she suggests, her

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