9.

My days didn’t get easier, I just became better at the processes. I mastered the early wake-up, pumping the fuel, locating the trash, steering the mower, when to cut myself off at the bar with the strung-up lights, and sensing what Hannah needed before she had to tell me. I drove across the bridge onto Kiawah Island while the radio played and light worked its way over the trees at the far end of the marshes.

It was Friday and the week had been even hotter than the one before. I pulled the cord and the mower sprang to life. Already I could do my area in just over half the time it had taken me the week before. I reached the lawn by the lake, emptied the bag and began. When I was finished, I shut it off and sat on the grass a few feet up from where I’d fallen, obscured from the road by a garden bed of tall ferns. I smoked a cigarette while the sky turned a lighter blue. Grass reflected the yellow of the sun and shadows moved in the cool air. I tilted my hat down to cover my eyes. After a minute, the figure rose, facing me – the movement so gentle the water around it did not wrinkle, nor the light skipping along its surface flicker.

‘Mornin’,’ I said, blowing out smoke. ‘How you going today?’

Nothing.

‘Yeah, I hear that. Excited for the weekend?’

A blink.

‘Oh, yes, sir, me too. Hey, you got a lady ’gator in another pond you go visit? What? Really? A few of them? Oh, you sly dog. I bet they like that scar, huh? How’d you get it, anyway?’

A bird landed on the branch of a tree in the distance and was chased away by another.

‘Probably from making this lake your lake, I reckon. Well, don’t mind me. I’m just keeping it nice for you. Besides, I already live with something that wants to bite my head off.’

It drifted a foot towards the bank.

‘No, no, no. I wouldn’t get close if I were you. That only ends badly.’

Another foot, now only four or so from the lake’s edge. I stood.

‘I’m serious, get the fuck away.’

Stepping towards the lake, I stomped so hard I almost slipped. It blinked again then retreated, disappearing into the water.

My chair in the lunchroom was always empty. People either respected it was mine or left it free because they wanted me in the corner. I didn’t know most of the workers, but I was on friendly terms with more of them each day as word got around about where I was from. Groups would yell as I passed, ‘Yo, Aussie!’ or ‘What’s happenin’, Crocodile Dundee?’ always followed by laughter. I was a spectacle to them, but at least I wasn’t getting in any fistfights.

One morning, the wipers of the Miata smudged rain across its windshield as I drove the dark, oak-lined road towards the island. I’d been working for weeks, but this was the first rainy day. The idea of working in drizzle wasn’t appealing, though I thought it might be a nice change from the heat and humidity, and I needed the money. I arrived, went into the equipment shed and wheeled a mower out.

‘No, no. None of that today,’ Dale said, manhandling it from my grip.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Can’t mow wet grass.’

A few teams went out to clear fronds and debris from roads and paths. I’d hoped to get picked so I could sleep in the truck on the way out, but Benjamin, Dale and I were told to help in the greenhouse. It was a tired-looking thing, like an ancient temple held up only by the mildew clinging to its windows. The inside was configured like a classroom without chairs: a doorway at the front and walkway running its length with rows of benches extending to walls on either side.

We were to separate stacks of plastic pots and fit them into trays for growing seedlings. The pots were smaller than a handspan, pressed into stacks about two feet high. Each one stuck to the next – glued together by months of humidity and dirt since they were last used.

Rain tapped against the dirty roof as we worked in silence. It was an oppressive silence – the kind that makes you think even if you wanted to scream, nothing would come out. After a while, Benjamin threw his hands down against his bench across from mine at the back of the room.

‘This shit is too boring. I’m losing my damn mind,’ he growled.

Half of the room looked to him, including me. Benjamin unhooked the portable CD player from his belt and opened it to remove a disc. He walked to the front of the room to a dusty stereo sitting on the shelf. He ejected a CD and, without even a glance, tossed it like a Frisbee into the corner of the greenhouse to replace with his own. A loud bassline began thumping from the speakers – the badly produced demo tape of some not-so-talented rapper. I preferred the silence. Benjamin strutted back down the aisle to the hollers of his friends, pouting his lips and high-fiving each of them as he passed their bench. He spun on the spot, dipping the visor of his cap with one hand and tucking the thumb of the other into his belt as he thrust his hips and came up onto his toes. A little Michael Jackson. Reaching his bench, he looked at me. I bumped a fist into his waiting one. We smiled and I went back to my pots and trays.

‘Boy, turn that shit off,’ Rupert said from his bench nearest the front.

‘Na-uh! I can’t hear you!’ Benjamin yelled back, still dancing.

‘I’m sick of this Black trash.’

‘Old man, you is Black!’ yelled one of Benjamin’s friends.

Half the room laughed.

‘Yeah, but I’m the good kind of Black!’

The entire room laughed.

‘And this shit’s getting turned off right now,’ he added.

‘Don’t do it. Don’t you dare stop the music, old man. I’ll kill your ass,’ Benjamin said as Rupert approached the stereo and lowered the volume. A few of his allies stepped out from their benches with chests puffed towards Rupert.

‘Oh, that so? That’s the way it’s gonna be? Alright then, I got something for you.’

Rupert turned from the stereo, and passed through the doorway at the front, his figure becoming distorted and blurred in the dirty glass as he walked away from the greenhouse. Nobody spoke as Benjamin’s CD quietly segued onto another track. The tone had seemed light-hearted to me, but now tension filled the air. I looked to Dale. He shrugged and shook his head, returning to his work. After a minute, Rupert returned with a damp hat and shoulders.

‘Here, told you I had something for your disrespectful asses.’

He reached a hand around to his back pocket and pulled it out. The room halted. Between his fingers was a case with a tape inside.

‘The hell is that?’ a squinting Benjamin asked from the back of the room.

‘Ha! It’s a cassette! Dude’s got a cassette!’ yelled one of the others, holding his gut, almost toppling over in laughter.

‘Yo, why not grab a vinyl while you at it?’ quipped another.

‘You a fuckin’ weird dude, Rupert, you know that?’ from a third.

He ignored them, waving a hand by his ear as he shuffled to the player and pressed ‘STOP’. He opened the cassette tray, slid his in and pushed it shut. The room was silent in anticipation. Even the rain seemed eager to know what was coming. I heard a guitar, strings, a drum beat, and then a piano that sounded soothing and familiar to me.

‘Oh. Oh, alright, grandpa,’ Benjamin said, getting into it, smiling and rolling his shoulders in circles alternating left to right. ‘Not bad.’

The others who’d ridiculed Rupert also started swaying at their benches.

‘Now this some real music. This here … this gold … this black covered in gold!’ Rupert yelled to Benjamin, cranking the volume and clicking his fingers as he walked back to his bench.

It was coming to me. I’d heard this from the speaker of my mother’s record player as a child. The bars of music repeated themselves a few times, and then a voice:

‘Me and Mrs. Jones …’

A trumpet came in during the first line and filled the room, sending a tingle down my spine that shot to every corner of me. I turned to Benjamin as the second line arrived, to see him serenading the lyrics towards me, his head ducking left and right in time with the beat.

‘We got a thing goin’ on …’

The song caught on and spread, one by one. Soon we were all swaying in unison. I even saw hard-arsed Dale bopping his head. It was like a rehearsed performance I hadn’t been told about. I smiled back at Benjamin, copying his head movement, swaying left to right as I clicked another pot into a tray.

‘Yeah, get it, white boy,’ he chuckled.

‘While the juke box plays our favourite songs …’

The song built in me and I let it all go, joining in with the rest at the top of our lungs for the chorus, so loud we could’ve been heard all the way from the office.

‘Me and Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones

We got a thing goin’ on …’

I didn’t have a family anymore, though I came pretty close to feeling like I did, that day inside a run-down greenhouse in South Carolina as rain tapped against the roof.