Wearing his white trainers, polo shirt and clean jeans, he enters the waiting room and inhales the smell of disinfectant mixed with the lavender scent-sticks on one of the windows. Half an hour later, his blood starts to flow through a tube into a machine that separates a yellowish liquid from blood cells. The reclining chair is a bit uncomfortable but there is no pain and it only takes twenty minutes. Then the needle is removed, the pressure cuff slides off and he heads towards the table with biscuits and water, a sticking plaster on his left arm. A bag of golden plasma in exchange for thirty euros.

The nurse tells him his plasma looks “very good”, if only there weren’t the occasional traces of THC in the blood tests. Those tests are a bit silly. He tries to stay off spliffs for a day or two, whenever he needs a bit of extra cash—which is to say at least once a month. But every now and then he needs one in the evening to offset the grueling ten hours of work. Sometimes he wished he would be like one of those white guys, creative types, “freelancers during the day, video-artists at night”, who have an odd puff in the gallery basement off the main square. He helped one of them to replace broken tiles on his porch last summer. These guys can hang in the city centre filling the air with exotic smokes and no one cares. He raises suspicion if he downs an energy drink.

At the moment, there aren’t many pleasures in his life. He spends his days with the crew—old Julo, Adrian, Karol and their foreman Vik. They also work weekends, especially if Vik lines up several gigs throughout the whole summer. When they complain, he laughs and calls them “sissies”. Still, he is more a friend than a boss—a good man, they say—although he inhabits a different universe than them. In winter, Vik flies to Bali or the Caribbean—it’s too cold to dig, there is no work and they have to go on the dole. Vik likes whiskey more than beer and that’s what he drinks. They heard he used to do meth back in the day and his brother and wife helped him to get clean. Now he just smokes fags and drinks in the evenings. Only a glass or two after work, he says, and they nod.

This month, they are on the gasworks. They are a small cog in a larger machine, built around public procurement, competitive bidding and subcontracting. It brings them small bits of work that they carry out cheaply against tight deadlines, pushing through ten or twelve-hour shifts. They fill the air with dust from the asphalt layer that they remove, the smell of the drill and the soil they dig out. Once the hard work is done, another crew comes in and fixes or replaces the pipes. Their role is then to close the site and put down a new layer of asphalt. He is tall and slim, but well-built, with strong shoulders and arms. People outside work sometimes ask him if he goes to the gym. “Yeah, I exercise daily with a trolley full of soil,” he laughs. The skin on his hands is callused, no matter how much “working hands cream” he uses. He likes to say that he was trained by the Koreans and their assembly lines for white electronics at the city’s outskirts, his character further solidified by the daily grind at Groundwerk, but no matter how much pressure there is on him from outside, he remains his old self.

When he gets to the site on Monday, old Julo is already there, wearing old work trousers and a dirty T-shirt covered by a high-vis vest with the label GROUNDWERK on the back. The U, N and R are slightly worn out. His curly silver hair is overgrown around his ears, drops of sweat shine on his forehead although it’s still early in the morning. He is a bit drunk but energised. Old Julo is one of the best labourers, and Vik lets him work without commenting on his breath smelling of beer. He usually takes one for breakfast, two for lunch with slices of salami and white bread roll, and several after work. It’s easier to chat to girls if you are an older man. “How are you doing, love?” He smiles at a pedestrian in a polka dot dress and red sandals. “Long day, yeah?” She smiles back and says it’s not too bad and asks him how the shift is going. “Ah, lots of work, love, you know. It’s summertime.” Julo grins back as she gives him a friendly nod and slowly walks away.

They secured the site from the pavement and the main road with a mesh fence. He didn’t put its panels in the concrete stands properly and left one of them somewhat hanging. “Mate, this is quite ridiculous.” Vik pointed to a bent fence panel, cigarette dangling from his lips. “Nah, that’s alright!” he reassured him and started taking tools out of the truck. Vik continued with his foreman duties. “You must wear helmets: it’s health and safety.” None of this really mattered to anyone and they all knew it. The only two things that mattered were: they finish the job on time so that Groundwerk gets paid, and they get their wages. Health and safety was a joke, really. A few guys died on construction jobs for this or other companies. His cousin was one of them—he was doing demolition work when the ceiling collapsed. His name got inscribed on a marble remembrance plaque and his woman is now a widow with two kids.

Some days, he just wants to have a break from it all: sleep in, go and see his daughter, go for a walk and have a smoke. Instead, he downs a cheap energy drink and goes to work after sleeping six or fewer hours. And then there are days he decides to stay in. Because he wants to, not because they allow him to or cancel a shift because they didn’t secure a new gig.

He didn’t go to work two days last week and skipped three this week, and finally felt rested. His wages dropped by 150 euros. Most of it was going to go towards his rent and child support for his daughter. He hoped the old man living in the unit next to him could lend him a couple of hundred; he could also put his phone in the pawnshop and eat at his mom’s and his brother’s the next three weekends. Even then, he would still need at least eighty.

He used to DJ before his daughter was born. There was a club at the edge of the city centre with two floors, the first one for white people, the second for the Roma. Sometimes Roma girls were let in on the first floor, especially if they were good looking. He played R&B and funk, but also house, hip-hop and drum-and-bass. It felt nice to take people up and down a wave, the room full of energy, cigarette smell and sweat. He would put on a good balance of fast and slow mixes and rely on classics like Goodie Mob’s Decisions, Decisions with Reakwon Chef it Up or Katy Perry with Snoop Dog. The audience liked his melodic choices. They kept them moving and interested. It felt good and he looked cool.

One day after a gig, a girl with pink hair wearing platform shoes with a pink furry strap approached him and asked for the way to the train station. He offered to walk her there. As they walked through the park, she put her arms around his back, extended her neck and pulled him to her. Their carefree lovemaking on the bench did not take long but it put him on a trajectory of being a boyfriend and later a father. The first didn’t last, the latter means the world to him.

He doesn’t get to see his daughter very often. Once a week, sometimes less than that. After the split, the daughter stayed with her mother in a small studio in a workers’ hostel with residents who could not afford the deposit for a regular flat. The rent gets covered by housing benefit, but she often struggles to pay for the water bills, an inflated lump sum paid per person in the absence of water meters. Things were supposed to get better for her after she got a new man who ran some business. They didn’t. During one of his visits, he found the new man sitting on the bed, his heavy body leaning against the wall, legs spread out, ordering the mother of his daughter to make them coffee, cursing her in a rough voice when he decided she was taking too long. The room was filled with the smell of the new man’s sweat and cigarettes, the tiny kitchenette counter covered with bread, slices of salami, gherkins and a few packs of instant noodle soup. Dressed in a pink bathrobe with her hair tight back in a greasy ponytail, she was clumsily pouring hot water on a small amount of ground coffee. He noticed that she had lost a lot of weight. She never asked him for money in the presence of the new man, so it caught him by surprise when she did it that one time. He took fifteen out of the thirty euros, handed it to her, adding: “For the little one.” She grabbed the money and gave it to the new man. He let the bitter taste and worry pass. After this encounter, he preferred to pick up his daughter from the main hostel entrance.

His daughter runs towards him, he kneels down and gives her a hug. They head off for a little walk to the playground. She first chooses a swing, and he guards her from a distance, avoiding eye contact with the parents nearby. She seems smaller than the other kids. He knows from her mother that she is one of the shortest in her class and people often guess that she is a few years younger than her age. When she finishes with the swing, she moves towards the climbing frames, discussing something with one of the other little girls, a friend from school perhaps. He sits on a nearby bench, waves at her and stretched his legs. The late August sun is gently setting, and it is soon time to go and grab something to eat. He takes his daughter by her little hand and she waves goodbye to her friend as they walk off. At the kiosk in a nearby park they buy a hot dog and a lemonade and sit down on white plastic chairs to eat the treat. His daughter tells him about the puppy her friend got for her birthday, which would sleep on a little pillow in their flat and needed to be taught not to pee anywhere it liked. She giggles and he smiles. Tomorrow will start with one or two energy drinks, followed by ten hours of graft and an instant noodle soup for dinner, but he didn’t need to think about it now.