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.
‘Fucking takings are crap again.’
‘Yeah?’ Barrie was distracted by the adjustments he was making to one of the displays.
When Sadie’s Dungeon had first opened, sales had initially been great, but ever since then – thanks mainly to the internet, and despite the lads’ conscientious customer-care routine – business had steadily declined.
‘Don’t get your undies in a twist,’ Barrie said, determinedly relaxed about it. ‘They’re not that far down. We’re doing all right.’
Though Les didn’t share such airy optimism, he tended to listen to Barrie, who was undoubtedly the brains behind Sadie’s Dungeon, and in Les’s eyes a very smart cookie.
‘Sonja, we’re almost done!’ Les shouted down the corridor behind the counter.
‘’Kay … getting dressed,’ came a female voice.
Which was when the bell rang as the shop’s outer door was opened. The breeze set the ribbons fluttering as a bulky shape backed in, lugging something heavy behind him.
Les turned from the rack of DVDs he was busy reordering. ‘Sorry, sir – we’re closing.’
The customer halted but didn’t turn around; he bent down slightly as if what he was dragging was cumbersome as well as heavy. They noticed that under his massive silvery coat he wore steel-shod boots and baggy, shapeless trousers made from some thick, dark material.
‘Sir, we’re closed,’ Barrie said, approaching along the right-hand aisle.
Where Les was short, stocky and shaven-headed, Barrie was six-four and, though rangy of build with a mop of dark hair and good looks, he knew how to impose himself and use his height.
‘Hey, excuse me … hey, mate!’
The figure backed all the way into the shop, the door jammed open behind him. When he straightened up, they saw that he was wearing a motorcycle helmet.
‘Shit!’ Les yanked open a drawer and snatched out a homemade cosh, a chunk of iron cable with cloth wrapped around it.
Barrie might have reacted violently too, except that as the figure pivoted around, the sight froze him where he stood. He wasn’t sure what fixated him more, the extended, gold-tinted welder’s visor riveted to the front of the intruder’s helmet, completely concealing the features beneath, or the charred-black steel muzzle now pointing at him, the rubber pipe attachment to which snaked back around the guy’s body to a wheeled tank at his rear.
Les shouted hoarsely as he lifted the counter hatch, but it was too late.
A gloved finger depressed a trigger, and a fireball exploded outward, immersing Barrie head to foot. As he tottered backward, screeching and burning, it abruptly shut off again, swirling oil-black smoke filling the void. The intruder advanced, a second discharge following, the gushing jet of flame expanding across the shop in a ballooning cloud, sweeping sideways as he turned, engulfing everything in its path. Les flung his cosh, missing by a mile, and then ran across the back of the shop, stumbling for the exit. But the intruder followed, weapon levelled, squirting out a fresh torrent of fire, dousing him thoroughly as he hung helplessly on the escape bar.
The suspended ceiling crashed downward, its warping tiles exposing hissing pipework and sparking electrics. But the intruder held his ground, a featureless rock-like horror, hulking, gold-faced, armoured against the debris raining from above, insulated against the heat and flames. Slowly, systematically, he swivelled, pumping out further jets of blazing fuel, bathing everything he saw until the inferno raged wall to wall, until the room was a crematorium, the screaming howl of which drowned out even those shrieks of the two shop-managers as they tottered and wilted and sagged in the heart of it, like a pair of melting human candles.
The quarter of Peckham where Fairfax House stood was not the most salubrious. To be fair, this whole district of South London had once been renowned for its desolate tower blocks, maze-like alleys and soaring crime rates. That wasn’t the whole story these days. It was, as so many internet articles liked to boast, ‘looking to the future’, and its various regeneration projects were ‘well under way’. But there were still some pockets here which time had left behind.
Like the Fairfax estate, the centrepiece of which was Fairfax House.
A twelve-storey residential block, it stood amid a confusion of glass-strewn lots and shadowy underpasses, a textbook example of urban decay. Much was once made in the popular press of the menacing gangs that liked to prowl this neighbourhood, or the lone figures who would loiter on its corners after dark, looking either to mug you or to sell you some weed, or maybe both, but the sadder reality was the sense of hopelessness here. Nobody lived in or even visited this neighbourhood if they could avoid it. Several entire apartment blocks were now hollow ruins, boarded up and awaiting demolition.
At
