UNNATURAL SELECTION

Stephen Davies

Friday, 9.30 pm. Green Park tube station, London; the long corridor linking the Piccadilly and Victoria lines. This is the longest passenger corridor of the network and if you're in a rush to make an overground connection at Victoria, one of the most maddening. If you're not, then this can be a very peaceful place between trains. Even the buskers stop playing when there's no traffic, happy to sit down, light up and contemplate the silence until the next onslaught of background noise, disparate echo and clattering high heels.

Jamie has just arrived, and is pleased to see that the written hourly rota, a list of buskers' names and aliases wedged under the yellow cover of the central vacuum-cleaner socket (at least he thinks that's what they're for), is still intact and in place. Many people believe that buskers on the Underground are hindered primarily by hidden cameras, a two-hundred-pound fine and the Transport Police. They are not entirely wrong, however competition between buskers is also a problem and attempts to organise and regulate an essentially illegal activity at grass-roots level have succeeded only in compounding the confusion. But after two years' busking on the Underground system, Jamie knows all the ropes. To start with, he knows which pitches are the most risky, which are the most lucrative and and at which times of day. He also knows which pitches are prone to produce genuine confusion due to the persistent presence of two competing written lists (the second usually wedged behind a nearby bin, between the hinges of a gate or written on an advertising poster. And if Jamie suspects the arrival of an imposter, having first scanned dozens of lists throughout the network (who the hell is 'Pete', for example ?), he will treble-book three commutable pitches for the same time. This behaviour might seem unfair and wasteful of good money (usually ten to twenty pounds per hour minimum, if you get to last out that long) but is nonetheless welcomed by those who know the job: if Jamie fails to show up at the appointed time, another busker will trash the list and tell both Jamie and the next arrival that he 'walked on empty', a claim which presupposes that the list has been stolen by the Transport Police.

So much for fair play, thinks Jamie, wondering whether he should trash the list now or wait to see if his vocal cords are still able to compete with the murderous, stampeding stilettoes at the end of his stint. Unable to decide, he plugs himself into the portable combination amplifier regardless, wishing that he had an XLR input, for a microphone. The built-in digital reverb would be ideal for vocals. And a microphone would remove so much strain and tension from the job. But Neuropharm, the medical research company who supplied the equipment would not allow this; they wanted him to shout instead of sing, so that they could keep tabs on the accompanying metabolic functions, by way of the frighteningly sophisticated monitoring equipment installed behind the speaker cones, and wired directly to Jamie himself.

Obviously, Jamie was curious about the contents of his mysterious little black box, and he had tried to gain access to them on several occasions. But his efforts had all been wasted, since the humbug practice amplifier was apparently an irreversibly sealed unit. And had Jamie known what the box actually contained, then this would certainly have been even less surprising.