- transcription by maggie of @tommyplum
You see the idea I fucking hate the most, right, is that everything starts off perfect, yeah, and then it gets worse. That is demonstrably not fucking true. Some things are just born bad. Some people are born with no intention to do anything good on this earth, and they carry out their plan to deceive and cheat and rob and de-sanctify all that is holy just because that is the way that they were born. That’s how they are. That’s what they do, it is relentless. Relentlessly! Their creed runs thus: if I can, I will rob you. If I must I will kill you, if you let me I will fuck you, when I’ve fucked you I will leave you.
My father, Alfred Solomons Senior, was such a man with such a creed. He was a dispenser, a dispenser of semen to the gullible and the bewildered, a maker of bastards on a scale unseen since Genghis fucking Khan. A barbarian for whom every empty womb was Rome. He planted the seeds but he did not tend the gardens; he stayed only long enough to piss on the compost. And behead the roses to sell at Summerstown at the market there. With his stolen roses in his pockets he would leap the garden gate, leave them behind, only to send around marzipan, tobacco, and Portugal Water, which he did – he sold out of his suitcase, right, at sixpence a bottle.
At least, that is what I’ve been told. Yeah, so I’m fucking told, because all I ever saw of him was his fucking hat! It was hanging on the wall, on a nail, above the seat where my mother washed other people’s laundry. That hat was a holy relic. Was size eight-and-a-half, made in Luton, where the hat-makers go insane on the fumes of their trade and leave little messages sewn under the hat-bands. The message in my father’s hat was this:
THIS HAT, RIGHT, IS A KETTLE. IN WHICH TO BOIL UP YOUR WICKED DREAMS AND MAKE A SOUP OF YOUR SOUL.
It is the hat that actually I wear to this day. It still smells of Portugal Water and when I wear it the schemes and proposals come out of the darkness as if seeping out of the felt and the leather that is stained with his erotic sweat. My mother washed bedsheets. My father was a fucking hat. No kisses, no bedtime stories, just parcels of sheets to deliver to the hotels and the brothels of Camden Town for nothing more than black bread and a pinch from the priest who would then open up his robes when I passed and from that, I drew my dark and accurate conclusions on religion.
So, Alfie Solomons Junior grew untended and wild, a stem with a-hardly a root sticking up like a skinny cock out of the gutter so every nasty little Christian kid walking by their nasty little Christian school with their gropey old Christian masters could kick it down, and stomp on it, and shout, “It was you lot who killed Jesus, ahhh! So have that in your belly, and have that in your face, and see it as charity we’re not nailing you up like you did our Lord.” But every time I got stomped down I fucking stomped back up again, mate. I survived out of spite. And instead of learning how to fight, I learned how to put right the wrongs done unto me tenfold. A hundr—a thousandfold, yea, unto the fucking stars, right? By using the bit of my body that God had cleverly put inside a strong bone box so the kicks and the digs could not reach it.
The bit of me that is my brain.
With the help of the alchemy of my Portugal Water hat, and the strong bone box, I processed the schemes and solutions the mad hatters of Luton and my father had put there; my brain a factory producing schemes and solutions, dodges and speculations, ways around, ways to undermine, a trickle at night and a flood in the day when I unlock my bakery and smell the aroma of secrets, and sin, and begin the process of accumulation.
I am the chairman of Alfie Solomons’ Aerated Bread Company, of Bonny Street, Camden Town, to be precise. My two vice chairmen are Mister Threat and Mister Violence, and the former I prefer, but! But. The latter is necessary to support the former, because without violence there is no threat, and without threat there is no accumulation. Without accumulation? Well there’s just no fucking point, mate.
As a baker, I occasionally sell bread. As a bookmaker, I occasionally let the fastest horse win. As a landlord, I occasionally have a roof fixed. But mostly I find it is quicker and it is easier to deal with the complainant, right, rather than deal with the complaint.
From all of this you are drawing your conclusions: Alfie Solomons, begat from a bad man, and – beguiled by a hat-band – became a bad man who inspires bad men to do bad things in bad ways to good people who have bad bad luck! But is good enough to at least admit he’s a fucking bad, bad man! Hnnnnff.
…but. Consider this, right? In all my years, yeah, as a baker in Camden Town, I have overseen – I have organized, or otherwise been responsible – for the deaths, right, of thirty-five fucking men. All of whom, I’ll have you know, attend my dreams each night in various disguises, in regular order, with no pattern or logic to it but with the consequence that I wake up each morning in sheets that have been – they have to be wrung out, from sweat, right, by my maid Edna. Who, it should be noted, I have never had an evil thought about in fifteen years because when she washes my sweat from the sheets she reminds me of my poor mother, now residing in Hell and washing the robes of Satan himself.
So. Thirty-five men, thirty-five times … I am a bad man. But here is where mathematics comes to my rescue. Logic rides in like an accountant on a penny-farthing just in time to wave proof of mitigation before moral bankruptcy is officially declared, yeah? Here it is, ahrummm, here is what logic puts forward in my defense:
In France, right, Passchendaele for example, take one day, one hour, one fucking second: I am standing, right, in the uncultivated mud, a stem with hardly a root; in my hands, I have an artillery shell. It is the size and weight of a newborn baby. A little bastard, made in Birmingham, sharp-nosed, the colour of the morning sky; and in that one second, one fucking second of one day, of one month, of four years, in that one second I feed that baby to the upturned mortar barrel arse-first. I turn, I put my fingers in my ears, and … BOOM. I send my baby into the morning sky, to do the only job it was ever, ever intended to do. Two seconds later, another boom, and there, in the mud, over there, lie thirty-six men.
The thirty-six killed by the soldier, right, are just as dead, right, as the thirty-five killed by the baker. But the thirty-six, they do not attend my dreams and are not there in God’s ledger counting the good against the bad. I was given a medal for the thirty-six. But I took a bullet from the Peaky Blinders for the thirty-five. So.
Therefore, my beloved congregation, I will leave you with this conclusion, right:
There is no good and there is no bad that is categorical in this world beyond the calculations of powerful men, right, who shift the definition according to their own selfish schemes of accumulation. The only things that are categorical are life and death, and for argument’s sake we say life is good, and death is bad – purely, purely, for argument’s sake. Which means … which means my father was fucking right, mate. You dispense your semen, you piss on the compost, you deadhead the fucking roses, leap the garden gate, take what you’ve stolen to market and you sell it at a reasonable price, leaving behind only your hat and the scent of your fucking wares, mate.
That is the creed of Alfie Solomons. A lame shepherd among nimble goats who nevertheless at the stable doors shall be counted and accumulated as lambs to my gentle slaughter. Because never forget this, right:
Alfie Solomons is always waiting.
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