A Selection from the Catchfire Press book... 'IS THAT LOVE?:
The Disruption Of Mervyn Frisby Mervyn Frisby was a good son. Mrs Frisby had to give credit where credit was due. ‘He's a good boy, my Mervyn,' she confided, and the street had to agree. That Mervyn showed small interest in social life was not a cause of concern to his mother. She agreed that to marry in haste was to repent at leisure. Mervyn was barely thirty. He would settle down when the right girl came along. And Mervyn had sound values. He was not like most of the young ones with their craze for gallivanting, though he attended the occasional race meeting. Not that anyone could call him a gambler; he kept to the favourites, except for his fifty-cent double, and seldom lost money. Of course Mervyn had always had a good head for figures. Mrs Frisby remembered the time he had struck the double and walked in with twenty-seven pounds. He had offered to take his mother to Waiheke Island for the weekend, but she had never been one for travel either. Mervyn bought her a set of saucepans instead. He was a thoughtful boy. The Frisbys lived in Freemans Bay, that part of Auckland known variously as historic, quaint, The Slums: a scene that: except in the negative process of demolition, had changed little in forty years. As much a feature of this landscape as the senile houses was Mervyn Frisby's lean figure, loping down the hill to catch the eight thirty-seven bus to the city. As familiar as the desiccated scraps of garden was Mervyn Frisby's concave silhouette, returning up the hill at five forty-nine or thereabouts. As predictable as the bloomless hibiscus was the pattern of Mervyn Frisby's evenings: after dinner he would help with the dishes, read the paper, and presently go to bed. Crises occur in the best-ordered lives. And as Mrs Frisby had noted more than once, troubles seldom come singly. She was about to express the thought again. The plumbing, always at a disadvantage with the pipes laid in a one in three gradient, broke down. And in the same week a cloudburst overtaxed both the roofing iron and Mrs Frisby's rain-collecting utensils. In the sitting room, Mervyn and his mother faced each other across the maze of enamel basins and buckets and saucepans and the chipped china chamber pot, and had a discussion. ‘I'll pay for the repairs, Mum,' offered Mervyn. He was like that. Mrs Frisby would not hear of it. ‘I'd be the last one to touch your savings, Mervyn,' she said. ‘You pay good board. I ask no more. But there's a lot of truth in the old saying, you know. Troubles seldom come single.' Mervyn persuaded her to accept a loan. In fact he would have met the cost of the repairs cheerfully. He saved only because he could not think of anything else to do with his money and supposed it might come in handy some day. But Mrs Frisby had high principles and her pride. As she had always held, something was bound to turn up. © Margaret Sutherland
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