Ever since her Serbian husband of over forty years ended his life at Dignitas in Switzerland following a long and not particularly dignified battle with bowel and bladder cancer, Professor Patrica Atlee had been looking for something to occupy her mind. Recently retired and relocated to the Belgrade suburb of Mirijevo (assisted suicide isn’t cheap and the couple had to sell their highly desirable property in the far more exclusive area of Dedinje), Atlee had entered a dull and directionless period of life. Having enjoyed a successful career in the serious disease research field, she knew she had to either reignite her old passion for photography and painting, or find a new interest before she slipped into the same distressing rut that her husband had during the final years of his life. 

      At sixty-seven, the idea of entering the ‘mature’ dating scene horrified her. The mere thought of a series of pseudo-intimate encounters with strangers, no matter how pleasant, intelligent, or attractive was appalling. Whenever possible, she tried to catch up with family and friends for coffee, but found their company dull and insipid, rather than engaging and comforting. After long bouts of sudoku, the perusal of favoured medical journals, and internet surfing, she found herself wandering around her new home enclave, a singularly unattractive amalgam of high-rise apartment blocks, populated by thousands of young families.

       Whether it was this – observing so many people at the start of their lives rather than the end – that both depressed and fascinated her, she could never quite tell. But it often saw her stroll towards the busy park near the supermarket, a well-appointed concrete quadrant equipped with swings, slides, roundabouts, and some nifty and well-used exercise equipment.

      And it was during one of these now-regular forays that she noticed something so extraordinary, she knew she had just found the project she so badly needed at that time. 

      Knelt by the entrance to the main car park, an old woman with a kerchief covering her head and a threadbare shawl covering her shoulders was petting one of the mangy street dogs that roamed Mirijevo in such large numbers. While a common enough sight – residents often fed the dogs scraps of food or provided them with drinking water in the particularly hot summer months (of which this was one) – Atlee couldn’t help but notice the large tumours that jutted from the dog’s body, especially around the throat, belly, and genitals. So large and disproportionate, especially to anything she had seen during her medical career, it was a miracle that this dog was not only still alive but could move around to any degree. 

      Not wanting to disturb the old woman, Atlee did a slow meandering circuit of the park and returned about fifteen minutes later. As she had hoped, the same dog was laying sprawled out on a warm piece of sun-soaked pathway. A mid-sized mongrel with stubby legs and a short snout, it had almost no fur left on its body. In fact, when Atlee moved in for a closer inspection, she could see festering sores and scabs under the patches of hair that had moulted almost completely. 

     Holding out an upturned hand, she let the dog familiarise itself with her scent. Perhaps sensing that it might receive another scrap of food, the dog hauled itself up to a standing position and waddled closer to Atlee. In addition to the tumours, the dog’s eyes were milky and clouded over, no doubt the result of cataracts. Not only was the poor afflicted creature riddled with cancer, it was almost certainly profoundly blind. 

      Regardless, it inched closer to Atlee and began to lick and nuzzle her hand, displaying the kind of affection shown by any family dog. It then – perhaps sensing that no treat would be forthcoming, after all – turned and ambled up a grassy bank to the pavement. An almost incredible feat considering its many ailments. 

      This phenomenon intrigued Atlee for the rest of the day, night, and much of the following morning. More than anything, it made her think of husband following the operations which saw him reduced to having to urinate and defecate into plastic bags attached to his stomach. Always an immaculately dressed and well-turned-out man (in particular, she remembered the sharp yet alluring pinewood aftershave he wore from their first meeting to the day of his cancer diagnosis), he was struck down by a paralysing depression, which left him almost physically incapable of lifting himself out of a chair to change his bags. Within a matter of days, their cherished family home began to smell like a public toilet. Day after day, week after week, she pleaded with him to snap out of it. 

      “Granted,” she said, “the situation is awful and the prognosis bleak, but you can’t just give up.” 

      Over time, she began to both resent and despise the man she had spent almost her whole adult life with. Whenever she heard the tinkle of urine or a slither of faecal matter fill his bags, she wanted to shake him by the shoulders and scream at him to pull himself together. 

      “You may have a good few more years of life left. Can we at least try and make the best of it?”

      But he would just mumble, shake his head, and bemoan his fate. A human rights lawyer of some repute, he had lived a worthy and productive life; he had done things anyone would’ve been proud of doing; he had made a difference. Only now, he started to resent the past in the same way Atlee resented the present.

     “That’s why all those tumours started to grow inside me. The pressure. The anxiety. If I got something wrong with a case, it wouldn’t just be me that suffered, but an entire community.”

      All of which was undeniably true. But only yesterday Atlee had seen a creature just, if not even more cruelly afflicted than Ivan who had the capability to provide for itself, be it in the form of basic sustenance and a warm piece of the pavement. The bottom rung of Maslow’s model, but it resonated with her, nonetheless. 

      Leaving the apartment, she headed for the same park she had visited yesterday. And while she saw no sight of the dog she had interacted with previously, she did she something which astounded her all over again. Laying on a strip of cracked pavement was another mongrel, a much younger and much smaller canine with a black glossy coat, but with two similarly large tumours swelling from around the belly and close to the groin.

      Naturally, this set Atlee’s mind racing. Having studied serious diseases her whole professional life, she knew that many factors were associated with their origin and development, be it genetics, lifestyle, or exposure to toxic substances. To have stumbled upon two dogs with such a devastating form of cancer in less than twenty-four hours struck her as almost impossible. 

      Lost in thought, she found herself strolling down the park’s intersecting walkways to where most of the street dogs were known to congregate. During summer they tended to lay out on a steep grassy bank near a small pavilion. When she reached her destination, she did indeed see twenty or more mongrels lazing in the already fierce morning sun. Knowing they presented no threat – the streets dogs were tame to the point of docility – she climbed the bank and began to study them at closer quarters. Due to the angle in which they had positioned themselves, she couldn’t inspect every dog properly, but the canines she could see were all clearly afflicted with tumours – some small, some large. Yet, when any of these dogs, no doubt altered to Atlee’s presence, moved, they all displayed the same, not just agility as the dog from yesterday, but a jauntiness, a profound sense of contentment.

      Rushing back to her apartment, she grabbed her digital camera, and returned to the park. 

      When she reached the small supermarket, she encountered the dog she had seen yesterday. Trotting slowly along the pavement, it yawned and blinked its cloudy eyes. Dropping down to one knee, she lifted her camera and began to take a series of shots, being sure to focus in on the area of the tumours (or certainly those visible) as best she could. 

      After taking around twenty-five pictures, she returned to the park and photographed the other streets dogs that were clearly suffering from the advanced stages of cancer. With the benefit of the zoom feature, she could tell just how devasting these tumours were. In countless laboratories, hospital mortuaries, and lecture halls, she had seen thousands upon thousands of cancerous growths, but nothing quite like this ever before. 

     Back at her apartment, she connected her camera up to her laptop and downloaded the photographs. What she saw when she studied each shot only confirmed what she had suspected earlier. But what perhaps she didn’t expect to discover was an endearing playfulness, the way the dogs rolled over onto their backs or dashed up the grassy bank. There was – and even at the time, Atlee knew this sounded ridiculous – a human quality to the photographs. 

     For the next few days, she returned to the park and took more photographs of the dogs. Each evening, she began to enumerate exactly how many were afflicted with tumours. And while she couldn’t be one-hundred per cent accurate, she knew there were well over twenty. A huge proportion in terms of the demographic, if she could cloak it in such terms.

      This only stoked her professional curiosity further. 

     Over the next four or five hours, she researched cancer in dogs on the internet to see if she could find any corroborative studies, anything which might suggest that this was a far from rare phenomenon. But there was nothing. Granted, dogs were as susceptible to cancer as humans, but nowhere could she find any study which had found such a large concentration of the disease in one community of animals. 

     Even though she was desperate to share her findings with old colleagues, she feared they would be sceptical. Serious, scientific people, they might well find the idea of a recently bereaved woman in her late sixties taking pictures of street dogs both sad and a little alarming, as if she was so eaten up with grief, she had started to lose her mind. But what perhaps worried her most was the hypothesis that was slowly forming in her head – these dogs were thriving due to the cancer. 

      In bed that night, she tried to think of a way she could disseminate this information without coming across as some kind of crackpot. A serious, scientific person herself, she knew what she had discovered was important and should be studied further. 

     When she eventually fell asleep, she couldn’t have said. But when she awoke, the perfect solution magicked its way into her head: a blog. She could upload all the pictures to the internet and with the right tags, she might just be able to generate interest from the scientific community. 

      After making coffee, she sat down at her laptop and created a blog page called: The Cancer Dogs of Mirijevo. For the next few hours, she painstakingly uploaded every shot with a description and projected size of each tumour. When finished, she clicked the button which made her new blog page live and viewable by anybody around the globe with an internet connection. 

      Only the most unexpected thing happened. Rather than be contacted by fellow scientists, around two weeks later, she received an email from an artistic photography magazine. They said that they were astounded by her work, how she had captured an innocence and stoicism in animals which must’ve been suffering so terribly, and how they wanted to buy her collection and exhibit it in the United States and beyond. While flattered, she was sorely tempted to email straight back and tell them that their assessment couldn’t have been further from the truth – these animals were not suffering. 

     In the end (and this was by no means quick decision), she decided to go with the no publicity is bad publicity adage and agreed to all the magazine’s terms and conditions. 

      Within a week, an almost preposterously large sum of money had been deposited into her bank account (more money than she used to see in a year during her career) and some of the photographs were previewed on the magazine’s website. Each morning, Atlee would study the comments section below each shot. And while pleased that the photographs were clearly resonating with so many people from such diverse locations and backgrounds, she was appalled that all of them completely missed the point, that they too thought she had taken photographs of suffering animals in rare moments of tender relief.

      So appalled, she took a radical decision. 

     Around three weeks after the selected photographs appeared on the website, she left an anonymous comment herself, saying that the tumours in some of these dogs were so large they shouldn’t be alive, and that it was unprecedented for so many animals in what must’ve been a small community of street dogs to be suffering from cancer. 

      To her dismay, however, when she checked the website the following day, hoping to have sparked a scientific debate, she saw that the comment had been removed. 

      With the exhibition months away, and burning with a desire to share her discovery, she had no other option but to reach out to one of her former colleagues. She called Dragan Lazarevic and asked if he could meet her for coffee.

      “It would be my pleasure, Patricia. Does late afternoon suit you?”

      Equipped with her laptop, Atlee met Lazarevic in a smoky café just off the Bulevar Kralija Aleksandra. With little by way of a preamble or anything resembling a standard greeting to a former colleague of long-standing, Atlee launched straight into her hypothesis. Talking non-stop, she showed him photograph after photograph, pointing to each tumour, relaying its approximate size, and how it would’ve undoubtedly been fatal to a human being. She told him that he simply had to speak to somebody at the institute, that a study must be conducted to find out why something so unprecedented had occurred.

       “Patrica, Patricia, please stop.” Lazarevic’s raised both hands, palms upturned. “Everything you’ve shown me is fascinating. But every now and then, the natural world throws up something that even we in the scientific profession can’t explain. And you know yourself how limited we are here in terms of funding. To think that the government would allocate any money to research what are in effect mongrel street dogs is absurd.”

     “But this could be important, Dragan.”

     “Then why not monitor the dogs yourself? Take more photographs. Chart the development of the tumours. See if and when any of the animals succumb to the disease.”

      “No! That’s not what this is about?”

      “Then what is about, Patrica?” There was a long silence. “You miss Ivan terribly, don’t you? I know the end was awful. But we spent our whole careers studying these kinds of diseases. We know they are as indiscriminate as they are devastating. By the same token, you know what kind of advances we’ve made in recent decades; you know how close we are to, if not coming up with a cure, then advancing treatments so effective, people need not fear that a cancer diagnosis is a death sentence.”

      “I know, I know.” Atlee lowered her eyes.

      “Why don’t you take a holiday? Go and visit your children. Be around your family. Trust me. It would do you the world of good.”

      “Because” – Atlee hesitated – “they aren’t my Ivan.”

…

Neil Randall is a novelist and short story writer. His debut novel, A Quiet Place to Die (Wild Wolf Publishing), was voted e-thriller Book of the Month for February 2014. His first collection of short stories, Tales of Ordinary Sadness (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2016) received much critical acclaim. One story was short-listed for the prestigious Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2009, another long-listed for the RTÉ Guide/Penguin Ireland Short Story Competition 2015. His latest novel, Bestial Burdens (Cephalopress) was released in April of 2020. His shorter fiction and poetry have been published in the UK, US, India, Australia and Canada.