Page 84 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. V #7

Choir Seat (continued from preceding page)
in a choir-seat, then you will spend the whole concert in looking at us as we sit together. That’s a recipe for jealousy, an emotion we agree we both despise. You’ll be watching us all the time.” She slit open the left side of the heart with a narrow, pointed heart-knife. Her gaze flickered between Tall Martha and the opened heart. “Take notes. Yes: marked left ventricular hypertrophy. Aortic and mitral valves appear normal.” She slit open the right side of the heart. “Pulmonary and tricus- pid valves unremarkable. Now for the coronar- ies. This is surely where we’ll find the epicentre
of pathology. The final crux.” Jane du Lac laid the heart-knife aside and took up a fine scalpel.
ing to the student. “I’m longing to know your solution. You haven’t said much; you’ve been listening to two difficult women feeling their way over a delicate subject.’”
“I don’t mind sitting in the choir seats,” said Tall Martha. Her voice was nonchalant.
“Fine,” said Jane, relieved. “That’s settled. Now for the task in hand. Which way would you dis-
sect the coronary arteries, Martha?” she asked, pleased to change the subject. “There are two schools of thought, as you know.”
“No: I’ll sit in the choir seats. You two can sit in the centre-back of the tiered stalls.”
“Transverse sections every few millimetres.”
“Good seats: they must have been expensive,” said Tall Martha.
“I would do the same, Jane,” said the student.
“So-so.”
“Good. We all three concur. It disturbs any plaque less than a longitudinal slit.”
Tall Martha continued. “And if you sit in the choir seats you get the orchestra the wrong way round, and you get the percussion right in front of your face. And the percussion in Vaughan-Williams’s Fourth is, well—” Tall Martha made an expression as if to say that she knew she was stating the obvi- ous.
Jane held the heart in her right hand and walked towards a side-bench. She laid the heart on a dish and began to dissect under a powerful light and
a magnifying lens mounted on the bench-top:
“I don’t mind that. I quite enjoy loud percussion.”
“The anterior descending branch first. The anato- my of the heart’s vasculature varies, as you know, from person to person. The first section behind the pulmonary artery. Look. Lumen half occluded. The next section. This artery is diseased.” Jane du Lac worked her way down the artery. “Ah! The pathology! Plaque has broken loose; clot. Coro- nary thrombosis. Acute myocardial infarction. Death more or less instantaneous. That’s why the myocardium is not yet soft to the touch.”
“Well, you’ll certainly get it with the Fourth. And you won’t hear the piano from the choir seats because the lid’s in the way,” said Tall Martha with an element of triumph in her voice. “Though I have to say the piano solo is in the Elgar piece, and in my opinion Elgar doesn’t really explore that instrument. He was more a man for strings.”
The male student spoke, suddenly: his voice was soft and unexpected. “I like you both. You are both friends. Don’t let’s fall out over this.”
Jane du Lac then investigated the circumflex branch of the left coronary artery and the right coronary artery. “Plaque all over, but the throm-
“What do you suggest?” asked Tall Martha, turn- 75
Jane du Lac stared at him also. The room was profoundly silent.
“I’ll take the choir seat,” said the young man in a quiet but earnest voice.
“And you, sir?”
she sat on a laboratory stool to do this, the male student drawing the seat beneath her poised bot- tom.