Tobi's Smile

By Steven Tafka

"Tobi, this is the story of how you got your smile . . ."

Who made a mess of Tobi's face? Three lovers, one act of violence, but who is responsible? A dental surgeon's grotesque facial injuries leave everyone guessing who did it in this 90's London noir. This compelling psychological drama pounds the streets of Hackney where guilt and survival are top of the take-away menu. Two men, with two truths, buried deep inside their damaged minds; you are about to read the story of how Tobi got his smile and only you can decide on a guilty verdict.

London's recession hit urban decay provides the backdrop to our journey through the underground art scene, with its DIY exhibitions and warehouse night clubs. We meet a wonderfully dysfunctional group of friends whose lives intertwine through love, lust, business, betrayal, birth and death, each in their own way, haunted by Tobi's smile.

Written by Steven Tafka, author of The Art of Crime: Diary of a Prison Art Tutor, published by Mirror Books 2022.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cry Books
• Release date: Mar 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739362010

Steven Tafka

Steven Tafka is the Author of The Art of Crime: Diary of a Prison Art Tutor, published by Mirror Books 2022. 

Book preview

Heads-Up

Dear Tobi,

This is the story of how you got your smile.

I’m sitting in a bath in Tangiers and the sun’s going down over the call to prayer at the mosque over the road.

Fudge is laid out on the bed, he’s nothing but a ghost, stripped naked in the heat, he hates it here, says he feels like he’s my prisoner even though he keeps disappearing for days on end. I’m squeezing this in as a kind of heads-up as to what follows, even though I feel there’s no more sense in the truth of it as there is in the lies we tell ourselves. Anyway, there’s no more space, no need for anymore words.

I’ll get Fudge to post this to you.

Tobi

The trick cyclist balances on the wire, the slick steel thread that wraps around your throat.  It smiles like the edge of a razor blade, glinting in the light, it is all you can see.  The dazzling balance, you look up in awe, how does he do it, all the while smiling with perfect teeth and sensible shoes?  It's a circus tent. you said, The ceiling's a beautiful circus tent.  Tobi took the wire between his teeth, smiled, and pulled the loop tight through his cheeks.  The neighbours heard the scream above the car alarm, they all remembered the car alarm that had been driving them mad.  Their televisions turned up on top of that car alarm and they still heard the scream from Tobi's mouth that had been sliced from ear to ear, his tonsils dangling under his nose.  His body went into spasm, diaphragm locked against his ribs, jaw dislocated, the sound of his guts roared out.  It cut the crap on the telly for a full half minute; terrestrial and satellite communications interrupted by the guy in 14a.

He'd stripped the floors and stripped the doors, restored all the original features.  Stuccoed and distempered, the immaculate flat had taste and sensibility written all over it. We all loved it, we all loved Tobi, the pre-smile Tobi.  The day that Tobi fucked himself he turned back from White to Black.  As the wire sliced his face, his blood pumped his cock so hard that he shot his sperm across the Moroccan rug.  Everything in Tobi's flat had its place and purpose, reason and rhyme, Tobi loved that rug, loved it pre-cum, pre-blood, pre the smile.

Val

Val knows she's disconnected, it's in her genes, it runs in her family and on a good night she'll tell you all about it. This Tobi thing has really hit her hard. First she heard of it was that Tobi had been arrested for running down the street with his face slashed open from ear to ear. He was scooped up by the police and dumped in the A&E department at the Royal London Hospital. The boys in blue said he was raving and couldn’t wait to get rid of him. He made page three of the Hackney Gazette with the headline Dentist Drama and their take on it followed the police line that it was a mental breakdown. It’s a good job that the sort of posho Islington types he treats don’t read the Gazette. Val just doesn’t buy into the psychotic-episode-attempted-suicide explanation. She’s convinced that he’s a victim. 

Val’s a bit of a brain box who did what her family expected of her and went to Oxford to get her First Class Honours Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics but fucked it up because she upset the wrong people. And even worse, she really liked Punk, so she moved to London, got a taste for doing speed, going to gigs and writing reviews. She went straight from writing agit-prop streetwise shit about The Dead Kennedys for Time Out and NME, to flogging articles about the world economy to The New Statesman and The Guardian.

She’s been researching something called autism and is convinced that she has this condition. Her brain is definitely wired differently. She’s a walking-talking encyclopaedia, a bit of genius if you ask me. Being a journalist, she has a nose for the truth, which makes me paranoid whenever she starts talking about the Tobi thing. The police are not buying into her theory.

The police are racist. Look at the statistics. If Tobi were White, they would be all over it. They don’t want to know. She is doubly angry about it because she’s convinced that Tobi is not telling the truth.

He might well have amnesia from drug induced psychosis, however I think he knows what led up to it. I believe he is trying to cover up his sex life to protect his professional status.

Fudge and Val used to be a couple and Fudge knows how Val's mind works. They were like intellectual sparring partners, always sharpening their minds on each other’s grind stone. They made a good double act even after they split up, but now Val doesn’t want to see Fudge or Tobi, which complicates and compromises things socially. Ask anyone, who's the sanest person you know, and they'll tell you without hesitation it’s Fudge, which somehow might explain how he fell for a head-case like Val.

Val likes to tease and test people. She put Tobi’s fetishistic reputation to the test during her routine dental check-up – I didn’t think he would actually go all the way, not with me. Everyone fancies Tobi, there’s something feminine about him that even straight guys start to get a little David Bowie over.  Anyone that's slept with Val will tell you that she's not really interested in sex. She does it because she thinks she ought to, it’s her way of affirming herself.  She'll even talk about it if you ask her, but Fudge never did, probably because apart from some distant, one-night stand, he'd never slept with anyone else. He was too nice, too sensitive and completely lacking in confidence. When it came to women, he was a duck sitting in his local pub, vulnerable to the first woman that cared to show an interest.

When Val told Fudge about Tobi, she laid it out in terms of her conducting an experiment, like she was an undercover journalist digging the dirt on an Islington dental practitioner for the News of The World. Fudge being Fudge blamed it all on himself and despite his liberal values, said he couldn’t cope with anything other than monogamy. Val thinks it may have been Fudge doing the jealous lover revenge routine that messed up Tobi’s face. Fudge thinks it was Val, saying, "She does have this cold, calculated anger inside her. I’ve seen her lose control and it is scary! She is more than capable; besides, I’m not sure that she actually likes men."

Val has been known to say that she thinks she's incapable of feeling anything, emotionally numb are her exact words.  Armed with this information, I asked her if she had ever been in love with Fudge.

How would I know? she replied.  I pressed her on the subject whilst she snorted a line of coke from the quarry tile that used to be part of the Fudger's kitchen floor.  She kept throwing it back at me, question after question.  I tried to explain that love didn't equal sex.  I left Val laughing on the sofa and went to the kitchen with the excuse of making some tea. 

Her kitchen was empty. It had all the usual trappings, cupboards, fridge, cooker, microwave, even a stainless steel peddle bin, but the place was a void when it came to anything to eat or drink.  It was spotlessly clean, except for a few water stains in the sink; a single crumb from a digestive biscuit would have screamed out of place. 

Where’s your kettle?

Chucked it. I don’t do hot drinks anymore. I stuck my head under the tap and gulped down what I could. I keep bottles of water by the bed and that’s one place you’re not going to get to tonight. Val talks fast with a nose full of powder, there's no punctuation or noticeable signs of inhalation and I let myself in for an hour's lecture on the role of women in a patriarchal society.  Fudge did well when Val moved out, she left everything except for her clothes and the microwave, and now he has the best equipped kitchen outside of a restaurant, along with a lifetime’s supply of homeopathic remedies.

Val drinks bottled water, alcohol and what little she eats, she eats out.  She's doing so well that we don't see much of her these days.  Her fear of flying seems to have been forgotten and if you don't book well in advance, chances are she'll either be in Washington, Singapore,  Hong Kong, South Korea or Brussels.  I saw Amanda last week and she told me at great length about how Val had been asked to head-up analysis of the socio economic effects of the pacific rim tiger economies but I lost it somewhere along the way, especially the bit about world banking and didn't have the heart to ask her to go through it all again; Amanda needs lots of attention and is quick to take offence.

Me

Less said, the better. I’m a mixed-up, mixed-racer. My dad was Moroccan or Algerian, Mum’s never quite sure, but says I get my great hair from him and my pretty face from her. She calls herself a Heinz 57, her father was part Armenian, part Turkish, part Scottish, part Muslim and part Jewish if such a thing’s possible. He married a Nigerian woman, which I guess is why mum looks Black. I’d liked to have met her parents but she says they got divorced, went their separate ways and never kept in touch. Mum hates old things, history, museums, it’s like she’s allergic to the past, so getting anything out of her about my roots is a non-starter. I thought about doing one of those ancestry things they advertise on TV, but never did.

I had a girlfriend called Sarah. We met in a cinema foyer. I’d been to see My Beautiful Launderette at the Rio in Dalston and on my way out, two women ran right up to me.

I told you it’s not him.

Well it was dark and he may have grown his hair since the film was made.

Are you two alright? You seem a bit over excited they were staring right at me.

My friend thinks you’re him from the film, Gordon Warnecke. She was so jealous when you got to snog Daniel Day Lewis.

Stop embarrassing me, she said to her friend and it was the first time I got to look into those green eyes.

You think I’m him, Gordon Warnecke, the actor? Don’t you think it would be a bit vain of me to watch myself on the big screen?

Not if you are you. That would be dead cute, said Sarah.

I’m flattered that you think I might be him, but I’m going to have to disappoint you.

They took me to the back bar of The Railway Tavern a few doors up. We had fun, it was all flirting and packets of crisps. Come closing time, they giggled off into the night with a beer mat on which they had got me to write my phone number. Two days later, Sarah called and asked me out; it was all her doing.

This was a real one, a full on loved-up-joined-at the hip-I-seemed-to-have-moved-in-with-you number. I was head-over-heels, besotted, fallen hook-line-and-sinker, whatever that means. She was posh, out of my league, so when she told me  about what had happened with Tobi, I shouldn’t have felt surprised, after all we had only been together for four months.

Tobi’s a dentist, very smart, very charming, and too good looking for his own good. And who can resist him? I’ve heard that Tobi can’t help himself. Once he gets you in his dentist’s chair, your mouth is no longer your own. He once did me a favor when I was in agony with a tooth one Sunday and by the time he had finished, I had told him far too much and was thinking back to My Beautiful Launderette; if had tried to snog me I would not have resisted.

Tobi has learned how to make it in the White Man’s World by dressing the part, avoiding public transport, and never walking home at night, My colour has never been an issue in England’s green and pleasant land, he once declared when I was banging on about me being hassled by racist White boys and the police on my way back from the West End.

Whilst Tobi was perfecting Sarah’s already perfect teeth, she succumbed to his charms on that high-tech state-of-the-art super posh dentist’s chair of his. When Sarah told me that she and Tobi had got a bit carried away, I tried to be all mature about it, after all he did have a bit of a reputation and a very loyal and predominantly female list of private patients.

The next time I saw him, I’ll admit that I wanted to kill him. I was about to call his number but he came right up to me and whispered in my ear, Hi, Sarah said you would be cool. There’s a rather naughty little private party I want to invite you and Sarah to; I’m certain we will have some serious fun. he even gave me a wink before he slinked off onto the dance floor.

Sarah said it didn’t mean anything and trotted out all that bullshit you read in the problem pages about open relationships. I didn’t want to be that conventional guy who thinks they own their girlfriend, but try as I might, I was too insecure to deal with it. It started a sort of cancer inside me that wouldn’t stop growing. And now the world has gone to shit because of it – not the whole world, it would be stupid to say that, just the little goldfish bowl that me and the people I know swim around in.

Fudge

Fudge was at school with Rob and they took the sensible route of going to university, getting their second-class honours degrees, and taking jobs in sales.  Fudge couldn't hack it, went back to Uni, got politicised when he trained to be a teacher and is now head of an English department in Tower Hamlets where the majority of students are Bangladeshi.  It suits him, suits his enormous capacity for empathy and understanding.

Fudger's finest moment was his best man's speech at Rob's wedding.  It was twenty minutes of warmth and wit, in which he managed to weave together all of the complex threads of friendships that led to Rob and Marilyn getting it together.  He must have spent weeks doing his background research; apart from a few distant relatives that no one had ever heard of and some new-born babies, everyone at the reception got a mention. 

I was sitting on a table with Tobi and the most unlikely couple you could hope to meet - Gary and Amanda.

He’s not just doing the family tree; it’s more like the whole of fucking Epping Forest, Gary pointed out a little too loudly, drawing in the air with his cigar. We realised what the Fudger's tactics were and smiled nervously at one another.  Tobi said it was like being back at school, praying that you wouldn't catch the teacher's attention and be made to look a fool when you didn't know the answer to the question. The relief in Fudge mentioning your part in Marilyn's downfall was immense and allowed you to sit back and enjoy someone else being humiliated, especially the members of Rob's and Marilyn's families that we hadn't met before. Rob’s extended family are as White as they come, working-class-twice-removed Home Counties diaspora; they looked like tourists at the Notting Hill Carnival. 

Fudge stole the show, he'd taken the piss out of everyone, made us laugh at each other, but at the same time let you know that it was okay, because Fudge loved you, because he gave you permission to be imperfect.

Since Val left him, Fudge has learned to cope by overcompensating.  He's well on the way to a minor sainthood and every time he feels a crack appearing in his head, he tries even harder never to think about himself or his own needs.  As Fudge gives, so people take and Val took most of all, but in such an unknowing way.

Fudge, true to form, was the first person to visit Tobi in hospital.  Tobi's face had been stitched back together and his jaw had been wired so that he couldn't open it.  He had plastic tubes up his nose through which he was being fed and his level of sedation was such that he slipped in and out of consciousness.  Fudge contacted everyone and encouraged them to visit after discussing it with the hospital psychiatrist. 

There followed weeks of uncomfortable quiet chats over beers about the Tobi situation.  Fudge was the only one who appeared to be able to cope with it, which, as Amanda pointed out, was "amazing," considering that Tobi had ruined his relationship with Val.  The downside was the way in which Gary became increasingly twitchy about Amanda expressing her admiration and I really feel for Fudge, sympathy. She comes across as a sort of Cyndi-Lauper-girls-just-want-to-have-fun-Spice-Girl but look  beneath the surface and there’s definitely more going on there.

Gary

On the surface of it, Gary appears to be a fairly open minded, down to earth dollop of humanity, but put him in any slightly threatening situation and you begin to smell the real Gary and all his contradictory prejudices.  He thought that as Black guys go Tobi was okay, because he was educated, spoke with a passable BBC accent and had money. 

Gary was freaked out when Rob proposed to Marilyn. Gary saw nothing but trouble for Rob and even implied that Rob was making a big mistake - inviting Gary to the wedding was a big mistake. 

When Gary is nervous, wine turns to water, you can see him doing it, knocking back one after the other, hoping to achieve equilibrium but missing it by one.  Kingsley, Marilyn's brother, joined our table after all of the speeches and toasts had been made.  I was impressed by Kingsley's diplomatic calm and the fact that he didn't hit Gary within the first ten minutes. 

Whilst Gary ran his fat lip under a cold tap in the Gents, Kingsley and Amanda had a bit of a shouting match about the incident, which caused far more of a commotion than Kingsley’s deft backhander.  Amanda became a bit hysterical.  Vernon, Marilyn's uncle who’d flown in from New York, did exactly what they do in the movies and very gently slapped her around the face to shut her up. He then told her to leave with a beautiful phrase, I believe you left your dignity in the bathroom, perhaps you had better collect it on your way-out Mam. 

Amanda didn't understand the Americanism of Uncle Vernon.  She went into a sort of catatonic whoop, unable to catch her breath.

Gary has tried his best to apologise by explaining that people misunderstand his sense of humour.  He would swear on his mother's grave that he's not a racist and say it's just his way of attacking what he understands to be middle-class political correctness.  On a good day Gary could charm light from a dead light bulb, but he does have his moments. Tobi has always liked him because he amuses him.  Tobi had a good British education in Kenya, whereas Gary went to Hackney Downs, now boarded-up and derelict having achieved the educational accolade of being the worst school in England. Tobi, you're a right fucking posh, toff, Black bastard, was all Gary had to say to get Tobi falling about with laughter.  The fact that Gary makes shit loads of money in the City and relies on Tobi to tell him how to spend it on the very latest what's in or where to be seen places, also amuses Tobi, it flatters him. 

Gary works hard at his rough-diamond-working-class-boy-made-good image and constantly takes the piss, especially out of himself. He could easily make it as an alternative stand-up comedian and that’s why people put up with him – he’s very funny and sharp witted.  At work he's nicknamed The Shark, Amanda refers to him as The Dick, and Tobi calls him Mate, a word usually foreign to Tobi's vocabulary.  Gary invites contradictions but dropping a tab of ‘E’ before the wedding reception added too many complications to his contradictions. He told everyone he loved them, even the grannies.

We’d met Kingsley whilst he was working in the Fritters and Dumpling café on Sandringham Road – it was him that told us that the guys who used to deal drugs there in the 80’s were plain clothes cops. Karl loved Kingsley’s Caribbean cooking and helped him move on to a much better paid job doing catering for an events company he sometimes used. Karl and Kingsley, or KK as they called themselves, put on some of their own party nights in a railway arch on Andre Street. The cops soon put a stop to it after Kingsley wouldn’t up his backhander. However, the gods smiled upon us by giving us a KK reunion gig courtesy of Kingsley’s father hitting the jackpot. Mr James won a hundred-grand on the football Pools - his little row of random X’s paid off the mortgage with enough left over to take their kids to Jamaica to meet extended family and show them their roots. To celebrate, his parents threw a big party at the All Nations Club, just off London Fields. 

The James family did their host thing by hovering around a huge table piled with food. They greeted people as they arrived and invited them to stuff themselves on super-hot patties, goat curry, and rice and peas.  Staying close by her father was Kingsley’s younger sister Marilyn. As soon as he saw her, Rob was besotted, I’m going to marry her, he declared.

Val 

Once the Red Stripe and rhythms of the soca music had loosened people onto the dance floor, Rob went straight in for the kill.  Mr James was having too good a time to keep guard of his daughter and Kingsley, who was unaccountably out of it, saw what was happening, but could do nothing other than grin and dance.  We all danced, even Val danced, which was a world's first.  Marilyn thought it was hilarious when Rob tried to bump 'n' grind. She showed him how and loved how this good looking White boy was not afraid to have a go at getting down and dirty.  The constant flow of partners meant that everyone got to groove with everyone else at some point during the night.  The tempo was up and the heat generated on the dance floor created a thirst, which was quenched with the fresh fruit punch into which Gary had  added liquid Ecstasy.  The knock-on effect was the uninhibited removal of all but essential clothing, which in turn steamed up the arousal factor.  It was a case of drink, dance and simulate, except for the likes of Val who did her two step shuffle almost in time to the beat.  Most parties are quickly forgotten, but this one is still rated as one of the all-time greats.

Karl

I met Karl at the Pride of Spitalfields, a back street, Brick Lane, East End boozer where he proceeded to show off by introducing me to half of the pub, most of whom were either artists or musicians who used the place to dissolve their creative block. Two of them, Angus and Tracey took my side in the argument about love, whilst Karl found an ally in this guy called Adam.  The issue of art suffering for love was thrashed out until incoherence set in and we drifted off the subject and onto the procurement of class A substances.  Tracey made an executive decision, summoned a cab and deposited us in Charlie Wright's International Bar in Hoxton. In the time it took Angus to get served, Tracey had organised a whip round and got us playing pass the parcel outside the toilets. 

Karl spotted Kingsley as he arrived and dragged him over to our table; the proliferation of sniffing and manic bursts of laughter as he introduced him to the others, gave the game away.  Kingsley, who'd been stuck in a cinema all night, insisted on catching up with us and persuaded Tracey to get him something.  The James family party at the All Nations had been a seminal experience for Kingsley; he'd always refused to have anything to do with recreational drugs until Gary's lacing of the fresh fruit punch with Ecstasy had changed all that.

Kingsley

Karl has tried his best through the false logic of the chain of events theory, to absorb the blame for Kingsley’s death.  Tracey the artist, whom I've never seen since apart from catching a picture of her in one of the papers, apparently put it down to fucking bad luck, and he should've known better.

Karl secretly took photographs at the funeral, something for which even Fudge won't forgive him.  Those of us that know Karl, understand that for him this was more an act of self-flagellation than exploitation; he will carry those photos to his own grave unless someone manages to get inside his head and straighten things out.

Uncle Vernon flew in from New York for the funeral, his second visit in twelve months. The beauty of his words still echoes in the guilt-ridden voids that we all carry with us; on the actual day they were too much to bear.  Val was the only one who didn't join in with the hugging and crying, she wanted to, she really wanted to, but couldn't.  Rob was hopelessly lost. Kingsley’s shocking death had brought his honeymoon period to an abrupt end and slapped reality around his face; he hadn't realised that when you marry someone, you also marry their family.  Marilyn and her parents welded their grief together and physically shut him out; if