Kate gives our mum one last look but then shrugs and says, “You’re on. With marshmallows.”

5.

There is no greater hot chocolate than the one they make in Butlers Chocolate Café. Thick gloop of melted Belgian chocolate all mixed up with steamed milk and sprinkled with chocolate flakes that leave a dense, sweet mess at the bottom of the cup that you can scoop out with a spoon when you’ve drunk it.

I buy my sister her magazine and we sit on the steps underneath the angel statues at the bottom of O’Connell Street and drink our hot chocolates, and while she flicks through the pages I write a love poem to bedframes and axe handles and hearts and other broken things.

“Have you talked to Dad?” Kate asks when she reads it.

“Not yet. Have you?”

Kate nods without looking at me. “He wanted you to know that he’s persuaded Granda and Uncle Joe and Miley to vote yes. He says it was a tough sell but he did it.”

“Good for him,” I tell the chocolate at the bottom of my paper cup.

Kate gives a little laugh. “He also said Miley swears he always knew you were gay. Since you’d get him to fast-forward the old Star Wars films to the bits with Princess Leia in them.”

“I’m bi, actually,” I tell her. “Just with, like, a ninety per cent preference for girls. So unless Harry Styles suddenly decides to fall in love with me, I expect I’ll end up marrying a woman.”

I was twelve years old when the words on the walls told me I was queer. The front of the primary school burst into roof-high white block capitals one day. SARAH LENIHAN LIKES GIRLS, it said. It took up the whole wall. Maybe the city did it on purpose. Having it right there where I couldn’t hide it meant I’d have to actually think about it. Acknowledge it. Let the words fill me up like they took up the entire space of the outside of the primary school, impossible to ignore.

“You should talk to him,” Kate says.

“I will.”

But I know I won’t. Just like I know I won’t end up marrying anybody, no matter what I just told my sister. In front of me, the bricks above the clock on the wall of Easons slowly light up with the words DON’T BOTHER. Another no poster glares over from a nearby lamp post.

Overhead, the seagulls scream. Maimed pigeons peck at rubbish on the footpath. The smell of the river mixes with the mushy-pea stench blowing in from the Guinness brewery downstream and the buses puff smoke at passing cyclists.

Maybe Angel O’Rourke is right. Marriage is a sham. Love never lasts. I can’t even vote in this stupid referendum anyway. So why bother?

6.

The words started when I was six. Before then it was all pictures and colours, things I could understand. A big red splash of an X on the road I was just about to cross when a car pulled out of a driveway at speed. A black cloud on the wall outside a shop in which my sister would have a tantrum. A spray-painted cat above an archway through which a stray kitten was meowing. Hearts and arrows. My name – Sarah – anywhere it wanted me to go.