I shook my head.
‘My sailing discipline – the one I went to the Olympics for – is men’s laser,’ he said. ‘It has complicated rules. It’s not like running or swimming, where you have one race over a set distance and the fastest person wins. Over about a week, you race ten times in the qualifying races, and you get points. If you come first in a race, you get one point, second you get two, and so on.’
‘Like golf? The lowest score wins?’
‘Pretty much,’ he said. ‘I won’t bore you with the details, but by the time it got to our last race at the Olympics, I was so far ahead in the points that I’d already won. There was no mathematical way that anyone could catch me. As long as I finished the race, I was guaranteed the gold medal.’
He looked up at the stars. ‘I spent hours with the sports psychologist the night before the last race,’ he said. ‘I was petrified that I was going to fuck it up. That I was going to sink my dinghy or something and this gold medal that everyone was talking about how I’d already won was going to slip between my fingers.’
‘But it didn’t. You won.’
‘I did, but I still almost had a panic attack during the race,’ he said. ‘I finished ninth. Out of ten. Which is pretty good, considering the only thing I remember about it was trying to hold myself together. My body was on autopilot. They talk a lot about mind over matter in elite sports, but this was pure matter over mind.’
He exhaled. ‘It wasn’t the way I wanted to win, but I still won, you know?’ he said. ‘And it would have been fine if I’d been able to hide it better. If some commentator hadn’tnoticed me losing my shit during the race. Because then that became the story. Not “Dylan Jayasinghe Mellor wins gold medal”, but “Dylan Jayasinghe Mellor nearly chokes and throws gold medal away”.’
He stood up suddenly and took a few steps away from me. ‘Maybe even that would have been all right,’ he said, facing away from me. ‘If I’d been white.’
‘Oh, Dylan,’ I said softly.
He turned back around. ‘If I’d been white, then all the coverage would have been “Brave man overcomes obstacle, still triumphs”,’ he said. ‘And there was a fair bit of that, don’t get me wrong. That was what we bounced off to create Ties Out. But then there was the other kind. Where all they could talk about was how an athlete “from here” wouldn’t have crumbled like I did.’
He put scare quotes around it with his fingers. ‘Never mind that I actuallyamfrom here. I’ve spent most of my life here. I went to school here. I learned to sail here. This is the country I won a gold medal for. It wasn’t enough.Iwasn’t enough, and me not being enough became ammunition for people who wanted to push the idea that no one like me could ever be enough.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m so, so sorry that happened to you, Dylan.’
‘That’s why I have to get this right,’ he said. ‘That’s why when Murray tells me shit like “no, you can’t go in there, you have to pretend you don’t know that someone hit your best friend”, I have to listen, even if everything in me is screaming. I’m the first person of colour to ever be the lead in thisfranchise. If I do a bad job of being the Romeo, it won’t just reflect badly on me. I can’t just go through the motions. I can’t just pick someone at the end and trust that’ll it be enough. I have to do it perfectly. I have to do everything perfectly. Because sometimes you can win a gold medal and that still won’t be enough.’
I didn’t know what to say.
I understood it intellectually. I even understood it a little experientially. Like I’d told Carrie all that time ago in my audition, people had a tendency to think that foster kids either were or would end up as criminals. I’d been cast in some narratives before. I’d borne the brunt of some assumptions.
But it wasn’t the same as this, though. Nowhere near as inescapable. Nowhere near as pervasive. Nowhere near as all-consuming. This was something I could never even begin to understand. Not even close.
‘That’s so much weight, Dylan,’ I said at last. ‘I’m so sorry that you have to carry it.’
He sighed, and sat back down beside me on the stairs. ‘When they came to me, it seemed like such a perfect opportunity,’ he said. ‘To get this positive message about mental health out there, sure, but also to have another shot. To do everything right. To beenoughthis time.’
A tear beaded in the corner of his eye, and he brushed it away with the back of his hand. ‘But I don’t think I am, Cece,’ he said. ‘I just… don’t think I am.’
‘I wish there was something I could say, or something I could do,’ I said helplessly. ‘I wish I could fix this for you. I wish I could tell you that you’re being ridiculous, that you’redoing absolutely every little thing perfectly and everything’s going to turn out fine. I wish I could make that true for you.’
‘Please don’t underestimate how much you’re doing for me.’
He brushed another tear away. ‘Even that makes me feel like a fuck-up,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve been completely unfair to you. You signed up to be my friend, not my life-support system.’
I curled my hands into fists, driving my fingernails into my palms.
I knew what I needed to do. If I wasn’t going to end up completely wrecked by this man with the weight of the world on his shoulders – this beautiful, kind man that I could never have – I needed to break this off. I needed to let him go.
But he needed me.
And I couldn’t give him up.
I would. I’d have to, eventually.
But not yet. Not when there was still a little while longer that I could have him, all to myself.
‘You know the hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn?’ I said.
