I.

None of this, however – the media ‘furore’, the not-quite-sacking of his mother, the typographical anarchy on internet message boards his mother’s untethered temper had caused – none of this mattered to Johnnie, who, on the afternoon we are introduced to him (Monday, July 16th), was asking simply this:

“What a kahnt?”

The young woman started, and turned to find herself looking down into the two wide eyes of a boy who had wandered away from the main body of his allocated group and was now staring up at her.

“What’s that, hon?”

“A kahnt,” the toddler repeated, absentmindedly wearing down his milk teeth on the corner of a plastic block, “What a kahnt?”

“Cahn’t?” queried Hannah, pronouncing the a in that heavy, drawn-out way that Americans do when attempting to emulate the quintessential English accent. “Oh, you mean can’t.” —Only this time, she reverted to flattening the vowel in the manner to which she was accustomed.

“No,” said Johnnie, with a shake of his brown head. “Kahnt. Kahnt!”

Hannah was confused, and as such, resorted to knee-jerk reactions: “Now Johnnie, there’s no such word as ‘can’t.’”

“Is too,” Johnnie retorted, stubborn. “Mommy said kahnt, so kahnt is real.”

Well, thought Hannah, that would explain it, then. After all, Johnnie’s Mommy was English, and when she spoke, it was with the heavy, slightly smug drawl that in various countries around the world rendered her instantly recognisable as an Englishwoman (and an overeducated, condescending snob in her native kingdom); in short, Ms. Verne’s accent was the sort to render the pronunciation of ‘can’t’ as ‘cahn’t,’ with a careful, heavy inflection: cahn’t.

To be honest, Hannah wasn’t very surprised that Johnnie would ask ‘what a cahn’t’ was; after all, Johnnie was young, perhaps too young to understand the concept of accents. It had only been a matter of time, if you think about it, before he would give in to his curiosity and pop the question, and why Johnnie hadn’t voiced his confusion earlier in the development of his communicative skills was not something that Hannah, in her eagerness to educate, had stopped to think about.

“And when did Mommy say kahnt?” she grinned, squatting down so that their faces were level.

“Fri-day.” He spoke in the careful, reverent way that some small children do, that occasional and selective division of words into syllables. Hannah found his pattern of speech utterly endearing, and to hear his sweet voice always made her smile, but this time, this time, her reaction was quite the opposite:

Oh god; please don’t tell me that he’s talking about—

“…Friday?”

“Fri-day, on the T-V,” by which of course he meant the computer in the office he was allowed to sit at for one single hour every Friday morning.

Ah, Hannah realized as she reached out to gently tug the building block away from Johnnie’s grinding teeth. That.

Abby’s was a small (although the management preferred the term ‘exclusive’) day care center consisting of twelve highly-trained and over-qualified members of staff and 45-50 miniature anarchists, the ages of whom ranged from eighteen months to five years. Johnnie had been toddling and falling over chairs under their careful supervision since he was about two years old, and during that time he had appeared affectionate and docile and compassionate and sweet, and everybody agreed that he was an absolute cherub.

…Until, that is, the 25th of last May, when Johnnie – usually so affectionate and docile and compassionate and sweet, if not quite meek – was dragged, kicking and screaming and sobbing unrestrainedly, into Abby’s by his legal guardian, Janelle Anderson-Geller:

·&·

“Sorry,” was all the breathless, flustered guardian would say on the matter as she pushed the bawling toddler into Hannah’s stupefied arms, “Can’t explain—already late—sorry!” And she tried to give Johnnie his customary goodbye kiss, only to have the not-quite-baby yowl and thrash out at her.

Abby’s was a simple operation that divided its charges into groups of four or five (supposedly according to age) and promptly loaded them onto the poor women (or, for sake of political correctness, men) deluded enough to believe that working in childcare would actually provide job satisfaction. This meant that there were always at least two spare staff members on hand to temporarily take over one group whilst the usual supervisor singled out and tackled whatever form of unpleasantness that might arise in her (or his) battalion. So, Hannah summoned Miranda and took Johnnie (still whimpering) out of the main playroom and into the office, which she proceeded to patiently pace, jiggling Johnnie up and down and drying his eyes and nose.

Less than ten minutes after Johnnie had calmed down and was sent to join his peers, Ms. Anderson-Geller had called in a state of barely-tethered fury (“The meeting’s cancelled! Apparently they emailed me a notice; emailed! I don’t have time to check my email first thing in the fucking morning.”) to apologize a little more and explain the cause of Johnnie’s tantrum. Miranda, who at this point had returned to man the office and therefore was the one who had answered the phone, had asked Ms. Anderson-Geller to stand by and, after a brief exchange with Hannah, tugged a frightened Johnnie back into the office, settled him into a chair, and picking up the phone, asked:

“What did you say the website was again? bbc dot co dot uk?”

“Slash radio4,” Janelle completed, causing Johnnie’s small body to snap into a premature state of rigor mortis.

“M-M-Momma?” Johnnie stuttered, once Miranda had followed the various links that led to the live stream of Julian Christie’s radio show. He nudged Miranda out of the way, pushed the keyboard back, and positioned himself so that he was unhealthily close to the small box with two little men sitting opposite each other inside, occasionally moving.

“Where Momma?” he whinnied, banging his fist in a way that made Miranda wince and yank him back, “Mommy’s nowhere!” (In his distress, Johnnie had forgotten that he was too young to successfully wield the possessive apostrophe s.)

“Er…” replied Miranda, but was rescued by Julian Christie, whose chipper next sentence started with the immortal words, “And for those of you who have just tuned in…”

“Ahem,” came a voice from the phone, and Miranda mentally cursed as her hands scrambled for the receiver.

“So how is everything over there?” Ms. Anderson-Geller asked conversationally as Julian Christie proceeded to explain that, due in no small part to one walk-out too many, Radio 4 found itself in dire need of a new film critic, and was now ‘auditioning’ five potential candidates. (Approximately 17 percent of the final decision would be due to “how the public votes, so, really, there’s no point in actually voting at all; but still, we would like to know what you think – or at the very least, give off the impression that we actually care.”)

“Oh, it’s fine,” Miranda enthused, a hand pushing Johnnie (who had taken to bouncing impatiently) back into his seat. “There’s some kind of an audition going on—”

“Yeah, she’s auditioning for the film-critic-post-thingy.” (Is it right that that’s all hyphenated? she briefly wondered to herself.)

“Yeah, but—live on air? I mean, shouldn’t this sort of thing be done… privately?”

“What can I say? They’re British.”

Johnnie squealed at this particular point in the conversation, and Miranda half-turned to see a brunette, shrunken to perhaps one-thirtieth of her actual size, walk in and shake Julian Christie warmly by the hand whilst a woman with blonde cropped hair chattered about traffic congestion in the background.

…And so it came to pass that Ms. Verne acquired a regular income (though Julian Christie had cheerfully admitted that a mere 17 percent of the final decision rested with the listeners, he had failed to mention that a staggering 82 percent was due to his own personal preference), a fortuitous set of circumstances that led to Johnnie successfully tantrumming for the right to squeal over Mommy every Friday morning, a request Abby’s staff were more than happy to accommodate. For though Johnnie may have spoken to his mother practically every single day, they – Miranda and Hannah and the rest of the staff – knew that it wasn’t the same as actually seeing her, even if she had been shrunken to fit into a small square on the computer screen (webcams were wonderful things), even if he couldn’t touch her, even if she couldn’t see him.

And besides, they reasoned, what terribly unsuitable material could there possibly be on a mid-afternoon (London time), movie-centric radio show?

·&·

“What a kahnt?” Johnnie whinnied, like an over-excited teapot. Hannah winced and tugged Johnnie away from the other children; the exposure of her four-year-old son to curse words may have been to Ms. Verne a matter of no importance, and that was of course both her choice and right, but Hannah knew that the last thing she or any of the staff wanted was to have the other children go home and say: “I learnt a new word today.”

“Johnnie,” she said soothingly; “I’m asking you nicely, sweetie: can you please stop saying that word?”

“No.”

“Johnnie…”

“NO!” Johnnie snapped, threw down the plastic block, and stomped – stomped – into a corner to sulk.

It was all so unfair: kahnt had been scurrying around his mind like a mouse on crack for nearly four days now, ever since he had first seen the people’s – that is to say, Julian and the guest – reactions when Mommy had said it, for they seemed to him a little, well, excessive. (His was a vocabulary slightly larger than the average four-year-old’s, but that didn’t necessarily mean he knew how to use it.)

On Friday (the day of kahnt’s premiere), after half a morning and half an afternoon of deep contemplation, Johnnie had naturally concluded that kahnt must have been a Very Bad Word indeed, and over the course of the weekend had pestered both Janelle and her boyfriend for a definition, with absolutely no smidgeon of success. And he hadn’t been able to ask Mommy (who he assumed would know what it meant, as she knew everything), because she had been very busy over the weekend, and he had more important things to talk to her about in the 20 minutes or so she was on the phone, but that had been okay, because he’ll be seeing her tomorrow, and while he could of course have waited to ask her then what it meant, Johnnie had decided that he wanted very much to impress her by using kahnt in its proper context…

…And so, to achieve this end, Johnnie returned from his self-imposed exile in the corner and promptly threw:

1) a plastic block;
2) a teacup;
3) a picture-book, and;
4) a tantrum,

for which he was removed from his peers and taken back into the office, where he was given harsh, non-corporal discipline involving basic arithmetic, a fifteen-minute seclusion, and a toy ban.

“…Doesn’t matter any-way,” he later sniffed in the proud, sulky voice of a little boy who knew he had lost when Janelle picked him up and, after a brief word with Hannah in which all was revealed, had buckled him into the backseat and then asked why he had acted in the uncharacteristic way that he had, “Mommy’s gonna tell me all about kahnt to-morrow. Just you watch.”

Good, thought Janelle, perhaps a little too smugly. Let her. Then she kissed his forehead, ruffled his hair, settled comfortably into the driver’s seat, and happily snailed off in the direction of home.

-&-