Val Bird: Wednesday's Child

By MARGIE THOMSON

"I read an amazing book today," I hear myself say, and then I falter, brought up short by the challenge of introducing this gorgeous, funny, enriching story in a way that won't turn my audience off. But there's no getting around it: the immediate point that has to be made about Wednesday's Child is that it's told, from start to finish, in the voice of an intellectually handicapped man, Ronnie, whose mental age is around 8.

He's no Hollywood version of disability. Tall, gangly, chain-smoking, he stares stolidly at us from the cover of the book, his toothless mouth tucked up almost under his nose, his features an unsettling blend of child and adult. But don't be put off. First-time novelist Bird has achieved something brilliant here.

She has brought to life a man who is delightfully childlike and also breathtakingly, appallingly childish, with a more sophisticated form of manipulative selfishness than most children are able to pull off ("I wonder what her last slave-ee died hiself of!" he grumbles as his sister encourages him to write his own name on his Christmas cards.

And: "I tell you, this be a bit much for a poor handicapped person for one day," when he's asked to take a "barf", as well as pick up the rubbish in his room.)

Wednesday's Child is based on the life of Bird's brother, Ronald Downes, who died in 1996 at the age of 57. Ronnie had lived for 12 years with Bird's family in Whakatane, after their exhausted, ill mother was no longer able to care for him - and we can certainly empathise with her exhaustion as we glimpse, albeit through fiction, the chaotic world of intellectual disability.

Bird, who we meet in the book as Sissy, the sister Ronnie is always accusing of terrible cruelty and poisonous cooking, must often have been exhausted and frustrated through those years of incorporating Ronnie into her household, while still managing her marriage and children.

"Now I knowed you be finking to youselfs: ooooo, that Ronnie be a lucky handicapped boy to has a sister to looks after him. I sorry in me heart to have to telled you, you finkings wrong," he says ominously.

Longing only for scrambled eggs or "baking beans", he is tortured by Sissy's "chook muck" and "goo-may" cooking. Sissy is "the poison-er lady" to whose meals he is "a-lurg-ik".

He resolves to hide her new recipe book. "I hides it. I hides it way-aways where she will never finds it again (I good at hiding fings). Sissy be lucky I not dead (for she git puts in pris-on). I wish they had call out the doctor so he could seed what me sister be doing to mes."

The sheer skill and grace with which Bird manages to weave every conceivable personal and political issue affecting Ronnie and all members of his family and community, is extraordinary.

There is nothing polemical, never any sense that Ronnie is pontificating in a way that would be inappropriate to his fictional voice.

Yet, in casual observations we learn such a lot: about the lack of support for families; about the sometimes cavalier treatment of the intellectually disabled (Ronnie's teeth are removed without warning); the anger and embarrassment of siblings; the insensitivity of people who stare, point and insult; and about the ideological debates over the amount of independence, autonomy and self-expression to be given to the severely disabled.

Was it right, for instance, that staff at the day centre allowed Ronnie to share a bed with his "best girlfriend", April?

Probably everyone who has had a child has considered the horror of that child not being perfect in the ordinary sense. Here is what happens when that fear becomes actuality. Writes Bird at the front of her book: "As the mother looked at her new-born babe, she instinctively knew all was not as it should be. This book is dedicated to them and theirs."

"Special" is a word often used to describe people with disabilities, but here Bird extricates it from jargon, managing somehow to inject full potency back into it, without romanticising the person or the situation.

Ronnie's relationship with God, for instance, is certainly special. "God say I different than other people, I young in me mind," Ronnie tells us. "Then God smile his nice smile, and say in his best voice it nuffing for me to be feeling shame bout, I his very special boy.

"Then he say he always be there to look after me. It just as well he sayed that, for I git a feeling I be needing all the lookings-after I can be gitting ... I wish God would sort me sister out, she gits all steamed with me ... God say: poor Ronnie, the fings you have to put up with!"

Other times, though, God is an outside influence who pulls him into line: "God came in me head that night, he say I better be doing meself what I telled from nows on. For he sured it be Sissy who found me smoking slipper, and now she knowed I be smoking in me bedroom ... "

Ironically, perhaps, Ronnie's self-esteem is more intact than many people's, and this must surely be a tribute to the usually kind world he inhabits. Thanks to the generosity of family, caregivers, shopkeepers and others in his community, Ronnie often feels very full of himself: "flashed-up", brilliant at drawing houses (ooh, that Ronnie boy he be a real artist) and playing pool (everyone cheers when he gets the balls to jump off the table). "I be pop-lar," he says with great confidence. Even God chips in: "Congratulations, Ronnie my boy!"

Wednesday's Child will make you muse on the nature and strangeness of love, on cruelty and kindness, and on the rolling of the dice that makes us who we are in this world. It glitters and shines, and is great fun. As Ronnie might put it, it deserves to be "fay-mouse".

Vintage

$26.95

* Margie Thomson is the Herald books editor.