Some might laugh at that notion, given pornography’s normal place in the world. It was all very well people pretending it was near enough respectable now, but the reality was that, even if you used porn, you tended not to talk about it. You weren’t generally interested in building a rapport with the providers – you just wanted to acquire your goods and go (said goods then to reside in a secret compartment in your home where hopefully no one would ever find them). No, one wouldn’t normally have thought this a business where the friendly touch would pay dividends, but Barrie and Les, who’d jointly and successfully managed Sadie’s Dungeon, their street-corner sex shop for twelve years, didn’t see it that way at all.

Certainly Barrie didn’t, and he was the thinker of the twosome.

In Barrie’s opinion, it was all about improving the customer’s experience so that he would happily return. Happily – that was the key. Yes, it was about providing quality material, but at the same time doing it with a smile and a quip or two, and being helpful with it – if someone requested information or advice, you actually tried to assist, you didn’t just stand there with that bored, bovine expression so common among service industry staff throughout the UK.

This way the customer would more likely buy from Sadie’s Dungeon again – it wasn’t difficult to understand. And it worked.

Even in this day and age, there was something apparently disquieting about the act of buying smut. Barrie and Les had seen every kind of person in here, from scruffy, drunken louts to well-dressed businessmen, and yet all had ventured through the front door in similar fashion: rigid around the shoulders, licks of sweat gleaming on their brows, eyes darting left and right as though fearful they were about to encounter their father-in-law – and always apparently eager to engage in an ice-breaking natter with the unexpectedly friendly guys behind the counter, though this was usually while their merchandise was being bagged; it was almost as if they were so relieved the experience was over that they suddenly felt free to gabble, to let all that pent-up humiliation pour out of them.

It was probably also a relief to them that Sadie’s Dungeon was so neat and tidy. The old cliché about sex shops being seedy backstreet establishments with grubby windows and broken neon signs, populated by the dirty-raincoat brigade and trading solely in well-thumbed mags and second-hand videotapes covered in suspiciously sticky fingerprints, was a thing of the past. Sadie’s Dungeon was a clean, modern boutique. OK, its main window was blacked-out and it still announced its presence at the end of Buckeye Lane with garish luminous lettering, but behind the dangling ribbons in the doorway it was spacious, clean and very well lit. There was no tacky carpet here to make you feel physically sick, no thumping rock music or lurid light show to create an air of intimidation. Perhaps more to the point, Barrie and Les were local lads, born and raised right here in Bradburn. It wasn’t a small borough as Lancashire towns went – more a sprawling post-industrial wasteland – but even for those punters who didn’t know them, at least their native accents, along with their friendly demeanour, evoked an air of familiarity. Made it feel a little more welcoming, almost wholesome.

‘Fucking shit!’ Les snarled from his stool behind the till. ‘Bastard!’

‘What’s up?’ Barrie said, only half hearing.

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