The Messer

About the Author

Kim Handley had her first stint in the working world at 16 working at an office and did not like it one bit. She soon realised that her life would be full of depression if she settled down and chose the ‘Groundhog Day’ life living as a robot in the social norms.

She took off at 17 to travel the world, became a dancer, studied another language and at 31 she finally admitted defeat and reluctantly settled down in a job and started living in the rat race. Here is where she found the true excruciating pain of boredom and so started to seek escapism by writing. She wanted to write a book whilst she was going through a journey, in order to express her angry emotions and so created a fictional book based on true events.

Copyright Information ©

Kim Handley 2024

The right of Kim Handley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035847266 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035847273 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank all the people who are in my life, who have left my life and are yet to be in my life.

People that come into your life even for brief moments give you lessons. They both make and break you.

I would like to thank my friend Anne-Marie Leahy who has patiently listened to all of my crazy ideas, failings, and successes with a listening non-judgmental, supporting ear. In life you find your family, not through blood, but through soul connections and my Anny is certainly that.

A story of a woman who has emotionally recovered from a relationship with a heroin addict and falls in love, but she does not know if she is being manipulated, or if it is all in her mind. After a year of emotional turmoil, Kim finds out who she really is and discovers a darker side of her that she happily succumbs to.

The dust had settled from Kim’s previous life. She had what she had prayed for in her darkest times, full of trauma, entrapment, and hopelessness. Peace. She had peace. She had obtained a stable, but boring, payroll job to pay the bills. Her home was always spotless and it always boosted a smell of essential oils and fresh washing.

She remembered her time living with her parents, who were both heavy smokers, the old school types who turned the heating to full blast with no windows open, which created a fog of smoke that circled around the room, trying to escape, before finally absorbing into the ceilings and walls, turning them yellow with each passing day. She would watch her mum fall asleep as the cigarette burned down until it was a bent fag of ash. She was sure that the term Fag Ash Lil had referred to her mother.

She had adopted two black cats and was solely missing a dog due to work commitments. She lived near the fields around where she had grown up. It was a quiet cul de sac with neighbours that were mostly Karens and jobs worth, but overall ok. Her dream home would be a cottage or a farmhouse, away from every fucker else, surrounded by huge fields, and a river, and she would reside with a collection of rescue dogs, cats, foxes, chickens; whatever animal wanted to come and live with her it could.

Fortunately, or unfortunately (you decide), the opportunity for Kim to find a good man and be a stay-at-home animal mum had never arisen. She was seething and resentful that she had to work and look after herself. From an early age, she had always relied upon herself, but boy, she really despised working. In her ideal life, she dreamt of days in nature, walking the dogs, practising yoga, going to the gym and steam room, reading, cooking, and feeling whole.

She did wonder about being married, as she was a very nurturing person and always daydreamed of a rugged, hard-working man. The thought of him coming home from work and her having dinner ready and a bath run for him. She enjoyed the idea of this nurturing role very much but had never picked the right man who could look after her. Kim often wondered why this ideal of hers had been outdated and why on earth women wanted to work all day and be slaves to such a soulless system.

Was it because back in the day when women did not work, they were in a way slaves to men? If you got stuck with a bad man, it would have been a godawful life. So yes, here Kim was like so many other millennials, not having anybody to rely on, living alone, no savings, living pay cheque to pay cheque, and battling their overdraft each month.

Who would not want to be looked after? she pondered, as she turned on her PC full of anxiety, barely being able to breathe as she opened the day’s e-mails to complete another day in her payroll job. The queries started to flood in, one after the other, ping, ping, ping. Each query was something new that she had no clue on how to resolve, and so the battle began of the exhausting mission to learn how to do something, with no way of knowing how whilst being under time restraints as employees needed to be paid on time and correctly.

The job had been like this since day one around a year and a half ago. She kept sticking it out in the hope that it would get easier, but the longer she stuck around, the more problems came from out of the woodwork. She was having sleepless nights from the stress; her anxiety was bad and she was waking up in panic at 3am. She resented so much that a shitty job (she thought all jobs were shitty) was taking over her happiness and her soul was dying each day.

She had worked as a carer previously for people with learning disabilities and although she absolutely loved the cleaning, cooking and caring, she could not deal with the shift patterns anymore. She never had a sleepless night in that job though. She was never stressed and she loved the physical aspect of running around burning calories all day and looking after people. But now her current job was a mental stress, learning payroll calculations and it was such an intellectual bore off for her.

It was Bank Holiday in May. Kim had been dabbling on a dating website that afternoon. She had not been with anybody since she finally freed herself from her heroin addict, junkie ex-boyfriend. She had worked on herself for just under a year, and other than work, her personal life and well-being were in peak condition. As she was scrolling, she thought to herself, God, I cannot even be arsed to even go on a date.

It seemed like an effort for Kim to even put mascara on these days and the thought of a man ever entering her home again suddenly filled her with dread. Kim figured at that moment that she could not be bothered with dating; she had given her heart and soul to Lee (her past love) and she felt at that time she may not have the balls to love somebody again. She did secretly want somebody to just swoop in and be her king, take her away from working and sweep her off her feet and away from all the stress.

There were, in fact, many men who were willing and had offered this to her. But unfortunately, Kim was wired wrong; just like so many other silly women like her, she liked the bad boys. What she wanted from a man did not seem to exist. A man full of confidence, testosterone, free, a leader but also loyal and kind, out to find his queen. Unfortunately, these attractive males, full of testosterone, brash and with soaring confidence, were usually heading straight to prison.

They were not loyal, were nearly all on the psychopath spectrum, and were inherently involved with one or all of the AAAs (abuse, addiction, and adultery).

As she sat scrolling, a man caught her eye. He had a huge gold chain around his neck. Kim thought that it looked ridiculous but the mean frown and look on his face started to wake up her pussy. The next photo he had, was of him with a big spliff in his mouth. She absolutely cringed at herself. ‘You are 37 years of age,’ she told herself. ‘You are looking for somebody to support you. Does this look like the type of guy you want?’

But yet again, only found this type of man attractive and had the option to dabble with the devil as she was independent and had nothing to lose but her self-respect and dignity. She continued looking at him.

‘KIM!’ The good voice in her head screamed at her.

‘If you are going to go for this sort of man, you might as well have stuck with Lee.’

‘No!’ The bad voice said to Kim.

‘Lee was a stealing, heroin addict. You are hardly going to fall for that again, are you? It is just a bit of flirting.’

‘What is the point of switching from Brandy to Jack Daniels when you should be looking for a fruit smoothie?’ Her good voice said to herself.

The voices faded and she was already automatically sending her number to him. One of her must have’s is a deep voice. Previously in the dating world, she would spend time messaging somebody, and then when she finally spoke to them, their voice was unattractive. It all boiled down to Kim’s authenticity. She was a cave woman at heart. She loved deep-voiced, big-built, and strong grafting type men.

She would not be seen dead looking at an office type or a modern male who pruned his eyebrows, etc. Fuck that. Her phone rang and it was him! She was a bit taken back by how quickly he had responded with a phone call. His confidence and his deep grimy voice came pouring through the speaker. ‘Oi, listen yea, just thought I would give you a quick call to drop my number.’ Then he put the phone down. His voice was so deep and husky, that it had her attracted to him immediately.

His accent was unusual. He was HMP material for sure. Why was she even going to entertain this, she didn’t know. From his looks and further examination of his profile pictures (his slick hair styles and being sat in a trailer) and his accent, she had a feeling he was a traveller. She sent him a voice note and asked if he was a traveller. He immediately sent a video back of his trailer. Kim had always loved the thought of being a traveller woman.

Her perception of them was that the woman was to stay at home, look pretty, cook and clean, and keep a lovely home and the men would go and graft and give them money for shopping, etc. People tend to think of the Tinkers when you say, travellers. The ones who leave the rubbish everywhere and have no respect for the land they move through. But Kim was solely thinking of the lush static homes and the permanent sites that were now more popular within that community.

Kim shut herself down as she was being ridiculous. This is how she became—it wasn’t the man really that she wanted, it was the rescue, the way out of work. But she could and would only do it for love. If she wasn’t so deep, by now she would for sure be living securely like the thousands