Jiang Siyu stood at the gate of the construction site for two full hours.
The sun moved from the top of his head to the west, making the back of his neck red, the skin on his arms began to tingle, and his stomach growled with emptiness.
He took out his mobile phone, and the screen showed that the battery was still 3%. He looked through the address book over and over again, and finally dialed it out.
"Hey, Young Master Wang, can you lend me some money? Something happened here..."
"Oh Siyu, my money is tight recently, I really can't help, I'm sorry."
"Brother Zhang, I'm a little anxious here..."
"Young Master Jiang ah... No, Young Master Chen... Your grandma, dad, and brother are all in there. People like you can't even pass the political review. My parents told me not to let me play with fools..."
"Old Li, I am Siyu, I..."
"The signal is not good. Let's talk later. Hang up..."
He made more than a dozen calls, but no one was willing to take him back.
The people who usually hang out with him and call him brothers all avoid him.
The last 3% of the phone's battery was exhausted, and the screen went black with a ding, reflecting his own haggard and confused face.
When the sun went down, he was so hungry that he couldn't walk anymore. He squatted down on a pile of cement bags, lowered his head, and buried his face in his arms.
The lights on the construction site came on one by one, and the chatter and laughter of workers finishing their work could be heard in the distance. No one paid attention to him, and no one drove him away. He was like a bag of scraps forgotten in the corner, stuck there with dust.
The foreman stood in front of him at some point and handed over a bottle of mineral water and a box of lunch. His tone was not as fierce as before, and he even said with a hint of casualness that he was too lazy to care about, "Eat first, then work after eating. If you can't finish the work, you won't get paid today."
Jiang Siyu raised his head and glanced at the lunch box.
There was white rice in the transparent plastic box, covered with potatoes and roasted meat. It was oily and the meat was really big. A spoonful of brown soup was poured on it, so that the rice grains were soaked in oil.
He swallowed, hesitated for two seconds, took it, and took a bite.
Very fragrant.
The rice was soft, the potatoes were stewed to a pulp, and juices oozed out from the meat when bitten into it. It was so hot that he gasped, but he still swallowed it in big mouthfuls.
At the end of the meal, he poured the bit of soup at the bottom of the box into his mouth, licked the corners of his mouth, and his eyes felt a little sore for no reason.
The foreman stood nearby and smoked a cigarette without looking at him. He blew out a smoke ring and said, "After eating, go change clothes. The tools are at the door of the warehouse. You can get them yourself."
Jiang Siyu Stacked the empty lunch boxes, stood up, patted the dust on his pants, and whispered, "... Thank you."
The life at the construction site and the nightclub in the mansion are completely different worlds. The difference is not only in food and drink, but also in the entire way of life.
Jiang Siyu was arranged to live in a collective dormitory.
It was a wooden house made of iron sheets, with a yellow incandescent light bulb hanging from the roof, exposed wires, and a few spider webs dangling from the corners.
Eight people were crowded together, and the iron-framed beds in the bunk beds creaked loudly. There was only less than a meter between the beds, and they could hit the railing next to them if they turned over.
There are helmets and tools piled in the corner, and the air is filled with the smell of sweat, smoke and cement dust, which is too strong to be dissolved.
His bed was on the innermost bunk against the wall, and the bedding was an old military quilt that the foreman dug out from the warehouse. It was washed white and had threads on the corners, but it smelled of dryness caused by the sun, which was not unpleasant.
On the first day of work, the foreman assigned him the most basic job, moving bricks.
There is a distance of nearly two hundred meters from the unloading area to the construction site. The ground is full of potholes and broken bricks and steel bars.
Wearing the new safety helmet and the pair of rubber gloves, he bent down and piled six red bricks into a pile, picked them up and walked forward.
After walking fifty meters on the first trip, my arms began to feel sore and my steps staggered. The pile of bricks dangled in my arms and my palms felt hot.
Six bricks add up to about twenty kilograms, but he has never done this kind of work before, and his posture when bending down and standing up is all wrong.
My back was not using the right strength, so I relied on my arms to support me. After walking less than ten times, I was already sweating profusely, my shirt was soaked and stuck to my back, and my fingers were so painful from being rubbed against the rough brick surface.
A dark-skinned old worker next to him couldn't stand it anymore. He put down the masonry knife in his hand and walked over and patted him on the shoulder. "Young man, you can't do this, it will hurt your waist. Look at me..."
The old worker bent down, his knees slightly bent, his back straight, and he used his thighs and core to pick up the bricks. His movements were as steady as a machine, "Try it, don't just rely on your arms."
Jiang Siyu imitated his posture and tried it. As expected, it saved a lot of effort and my waist was no longer so sore.
He worked sullenly for a whole afternoon, with the sun shining from above his head to the west. His clothes became dry, wet, wet, and dry again.
By the time the work was over, both arms were shaking so much that they could no longer hold the water glass. There were four or five translucent blisters on the palms of the hands, which were squeezed between the roots of the fingers and the tiger's mouth, and it was painful to touch them.
Dinner is still a box lunch, but today there is an extra fried egg. The egg white is crispy and the yolk is half-cooked. It comes out when you poke it with chopsticks, and it is especially fragrant when mixed with rice.
He was sitting on the steps outside the work shed with his lunch box, and several workers next to him were smoking and chatting. They were talking about building a house in his hometown, his children going to school, and whether their wages at the end of the month would be enough to send home.
No one looked at him twice, or asked who he was or where he came from.
When he lowered his head to eat, he suddenly remembered that in the nightclub, the money spent on one meal could be worth the bricks on the entire floor here.
But he couldn't remember what those dishes tasted like.
Even those days were confusing.
Anyway, Jiang Siyu now just remembers to spend money like water and get whatever he wants.
The next day, the blisters burst.
The layer of tender skin on the palm of my hand turned white with sweat, and the torn areas exposed new pink flesh, which was stained with brick dust and hurt like a needle prick.
The foreman saw him grinning and threw a roll of medical tape over him. "Wrap it around and keep working. Don't be squeamish."
Jiang Siyu gritted his teeth and wrapped the tape around his hand. The white tape wrapped the wound, and the oozing blood stained the cloth with a few clusters of light powder.
He picked up the bricks again, gritted his teeth and walked over and over again. The tape was worn through one layer, and he wrapped another layer around it. His palms were filled with a sticky feeling of sweat and blood, but he did not stop...