Before Daisy

“Jimmy, move,” she said huskily. “I need to go, and I can’t get up from under you.”

“Go where,” Jimmy mumbled hoarsely, “stay with me, it’s nice here.”

He was still a bit drunk, and his words were slurry.

Felicia knew the boss would be looking for her. Staying all night with a customer was a practice he discouraged unless she was with a high roller who would pay for the hours of lost business.

Trade was brisk on Terrific Street and Felicia, petite, cherubin-faced, with cascades of glossy chestnut hair, was always in demand.

But Jimmy was her terrifying, beautiful, undeniable weakness, a weakness she knew she would pay for in one way or another.

She could feel his heartbeat on her breasts, and she flushed with love and hope.

That ugly life she saw stretched out - seedy bars, the groping hands of old but adolescent men, too vain to realise they were reviled, but tolerated only as a source of income - disappeared whenever she caught sight of Jimmy.

Just a tuft or two of his seaworn blonde hair was enough to wipe them away.

She curled herself around him and he responded by snuggling in and gripping tighter.

“Honey lips,” he muttered, nuzzling into her cheek.

He smelled of whisky and sweat, but she forgave him.

She kissed his cheek as sweetly as any mother would her child’s.

“My darling Jimmy, you know I have to go,” she groaned, untangling herself and sliding her arms and legs free.

Felicia slipped on her flimsy knickers and petticoat and scrambled across the floor of the lower deck looking for her shoes.

Jimmy lifted his head and struggling to open his eyes, he smiled at her and puckered his lips.

He was eighteen, Felicia was the first woman he had bedded, and his head was full of every inch of her.

“Fifi, staaayy…. please,” he whined. But he knew she wouldn’t, and he flopped back on the bunk feigning petulance.

“Tonight, sweetheart, I will find you tonight, here, so wait for me,” she said as she popped her dress over her head and put on her shoes.

Jimmy could hear her heels on the deck above as she left the boat and before succumbing to the need for much more sleep, he got up and went to the wash basin.

His throat was raspy, and his mouth felt dry and crusty, but Felicia was there in the mix, all golden sweetness at the tip of his tongue.

Never had he ever imagined sex would be as good as it was. When he was growing up on the farm, he had observed animals mating, a short sometimes brutal affair, a perfunctory part of the seasons. His parents similarly showed no sign that there was connubial bliss in their relationship.

He knew they had to have had sex to produce him and his sister, but now he imagined it was probably only on those two occasions. Hard work, long fruitless days spent behind the plough or over hot stoves and boilers, left no time for affection. They rarely talked to each other; imagining any caresses between them, was impossible.

****

He could hear Cody’s booming voice strides before he saw his head pop into the open hatch.

Jimmy couldn’t imagine how desperate he might have been now, had he not met Cody.

Had he not done that one selfless and spontaneous deed, rowing out to rescue the Tuolomee, as it bobbed perilously close to the rocks, he would have been back there, catching poorly paid work when he could, no home, no future in sight.

And he would not have met Felicia, let alone understood passion, desire, connection, tenderness, and love.

Cody, a man who had made a mint from oil, peppered his eternal leisure aboard the Tuolomee with a few stops for business along the coast, and weeklong sojourns with Gladys, his mistress and according to Cody, “never to be wife”.

Just back from her house on the bluff, Cody was refreshed. Dressed in full sailing whites with his captain’s hat on a rakish angle, he was a towering figure, immaculately groomed and smelling of sandalwood soap.

“You look like something a cat dragged in,” he said, “and I swear if I lit a match you’d go up in smoke.

“It won’t do J, if you are in my employ, old sport, we are going to have to do better, and that starts with some proper clothes.”

He hustled Jimmy to the deck, and they headed for the men’s apparel store on Main Street. Cody had accounts at all the best stores along the coast and in no time at all, he was kitted out in appropriate day clothes and measured for a new suit, something he could wear to accompany Cody to the better restaurants and bars.

When they met Gladys for lunch, she grasped Cody’s arm as though he were the last cool drink on earth.

She saved a cat’s eye stare for Jimmy and stiffened ever so slightly when Cody announced there would be three for lunch.

Her antipathy for Jimmy was instinctive, he had been nothing but polite and amenable to her, knowing she had a special place in Cody’s life. Try as he did, he got no warmth from Gladys, but he put it down to her devotion to Cody and therefore a touch of jealousy.

They were having coffee when, Cody decided they would set sail that afternoon. He wanted to see some land and a hotel for sale a few towns down the coast.

Jimmy knew he would need to get word to Felicia, so organised to meet Cody back at the dock in an hour.

Conscious of his new clothes, he entered the bar effecting the persona of a rich man. In just the few short months they had been together, he’d made a study of Cody, his mannerisms, his unbridled confidence and now he put it on like a coat.

“Could you tell Miss Felicia, James Gatz is here to see her,” he said to the bartender.

“And I’ll have a whisky neat while I wait for the lady, old sport,” he smiled charmingly.

As he waited for Felicia, the ambience of the bar settled on him heavily. In the daylight it was grimy and lurid, the colours too bright and conflicting, the floors sticky with spilled wine, the customers more decadent and unwholesome, the waitresses older and less luminous than he remembered.

And there she was, his Felicia, emerging from behind a curtained booth, she was a flower in the weeds.

When she caught site of him, she beamed. He wanted to bundle her up, like a new lamb and bring her into the clean warmth of his mother’s kitchen where, as kids, he and his sister had nurtured all the abandoned lambs.

Instead, they sat down, pretending he was just another customer. Their hands searched for each other under the table, and they both let a subtle sigh release as they laced their fingers together.

Time was short, so he told her there would be no rendezvous that night. He would be away for a week and find her as soon as he returned.

She tried hard to take the news with a smile. At nineteen she had already experienced more loss and sadness, than most people three times her age.

She’d been abandoned before and would be again, she told herself. But as she looked into his kind blue eyes, she wanted this time to be different more than anything else in the world.

She held his hand tighter, and Jimmy felt his words catch in his throat.

“Fifi, I want to be with you all the time, I am going to sort something out, I promise,” he whispered.

“I know you will, Jimmy, I believe you, I really do. So, I will see you next week, where shall we meet?” she asked with her best attempt at cheer, but her eyes were sparkling at the edge of tears.

“I’ll meet you at Paddy’s Bar on the corner of main, Saturday next, at say 9 pm, and we’ll go for a ritzy supper.”

The trip along the coast had been smooth. Sunny days and fair winds, Cody’s stories about business dealings, his adventures in Europe, Africa and along that other, more mysterious Barbary Coast, filled Jimmy with wonder and excitement.

He only had room in his head for Felicia at night, when alone in his cot she would come to him in his dreams, her luscious lips, her laugh, the feel of her body wrapped around his, her soulful eyes locked into his as they made love.

But when they drew into harbour that Saturday, she was uppermost in his mind.

He didn’t know how or if he could keep his promise to Felicia, but he knew he wanted her. He wanted to keep her safe. He needed to have her in his life, not just every now and then, but all the time.

He picked up the new suit waiting for him at the tailor and went on to the barber for a shave and a haircut. He bought a bar of sandalwood soap and visited the public bathhouse to clean up.

Shoes polished and besuited, he showed himself off to Cody, who was also getting ready to step out with Gladys.

“We look good, old sport,” Cody nodded.

They headed out together taking in an early dinner at one of the hotels in town. Identical orders of fillet steak, new potatoes, and mushroom sauce, for all the world they looked like father and son.

With his arm on Jimmy’s shoulder, Cody said, “There’s no doubt she’s a beautiful girl, Jimmy, but if you want to go places, she is not the one for you.”

Jimmy listened as Cody held forth. There was a girl in Algiers, the love of his life, kind, beautiful, devoted, but he left her there, knowing his family would never accept her. Years on and across the years he had wondered about her, dreamt of her, until one day he returned to find her.

“She had 12 children, but no teeth,” he chuckled. “I made the right decision.”

Jimmy smiled but felt queasy.

They drank a scotch and left the hotel heading in opposite directions.

Jimmy walked for hours, his head full of Felicia and the ambition that had driven him from the farm to find something more.

Cody had shown him the freedom money could buy, the places you could see, the choices you could make and the one he faced right now felt momentous.

****

In the dim green light of Paddy’s Bar, Felicia sat facing the door.

She felt conspicuous sitting alone, and she was fifteen minutes early.

So, she focused on her glass and the shamrocks painted on the table’s surface. She watched the door. Every time it opened, she searched for his face.

A fiddle player set up in the far corner. The music was cheerful. As the evening wore on the beer and whisky flowed, and a rowdy chorus of Irishmen joined in singing folksongs from home.

Low lie the fields of Athenry

Where once we watched the small free birds fly

Our love was on the wing

We had Dreams and songs to sing

It's so lonely round the fields of Athenry

Jimmy Gatz, never arrived.

****

Hope you enjoy reading this prequel to The Great Gatsby - with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald. All hearts appreciated.