From the corner of his eye Shuggie watched the yellow tips of his thick fingers stab nervously at themselves. Shuggie had only taken a mouthful of the lager to be gracious, and as the man spoke to him, he could think only about the taste of the tinned ale, how sour and sad it tasted. It reminded him of things he would rather forget. ... Shuggie pretended to take a light tug on the beer, but mostly he let it swirl around his teeth and trickle back into the can.
In the first chapter of Shuggie Bain, which takes place chronologically after much of the events of the novel, the narrator hints at the difficult associations Shuggie has with alcohol. In this passage, Shuggie keeps Mr. Darling company in their boarding house. Out of politeness, Shuggie accepts the beer the man offers but cannot sip it without thinking about his mother's alcoholism and all the misery he witnessed. Like letting the memories briefly swirl in his head before he tries to brush them aside, Shuggie takes the beer into his mouth but cannot bring himself to swallow.
If he played it right, the man was always good for a few pounds. But it would take too long to wait on Mr Darling to cash his unemployment; to stoat from the post office to the betting shop to the off-licence and then home, that was if he found his way home at all. Shuggie couldn’t wait that long. The boy let go of the parka then, and Mr Darling pretended not to stare as the coat gaped slightly. But the man seemed unable to help himself, and Shuggie watched as the grey light in his green eyes dipped. Shuggie could feel it burn into his pale chest as the man’s gaze slid down over his loose underwear to his bare legs, the unremarkable, white hairless things, that hung like uncut thread from the bottom of his black coat. Only then did Mr Darling smile.
At the end of the first chapter, the sixteen-year-old Shuggie, struggling to get by, considers how to get some of Mr. Darling's money before he spends it all on drink. Although Shuggie seems to have no interest in the man, he lets his coat fall open (he is nearly naked underneath, having taken a shower in the shared bathroom), and lets Mr. Darling's ravenous gaze take in his young body. Without being explicit, the narrator insinuates that Shuggie may be prepared to have sex for money, or at least knows how to use his sex appeal to convince Mr. Darling to lend him money. The passage is significant because it shows how Shuggie, after everything he went through with his mother, is left alone to survive at sixteen, leaving him vulnerable to exploitation.
With a stretch of her calves, she leaned her hipbone on the window frame and let go of the ballast of her toes. Her body tipped down towards the amber city lights, and her cheeks flushed with blood. She reached her arms out to the lights, and for a brief moment she was flying. No one noticed the flying woman. She thought about tilting further then, dared herself to do it. How easy it would be to kid herself that she was flying, until it became only falling and she broke herself on the concrete below.
In this passage, taken from the beginning of Chapter Two, Stuart introduces Agnes to the reader. At a window in her parents' apartment, Agnes leans over the ledge and imagines falling. Stuart writes the passage in a way that momentarily fools the reader into thinking she has actually tipped out and is "flying," but in fact the narrator is merely conveying Agnes's imagination. The moment of interiority is significant because it reveals and foreshadows Agnes's self-destructiveness. Rather than fear the fall, Agnes feels a momentary freedom as she considers how she could trick herself into thinking she was flying before she hit the ground.
Reeny Sweeny lived at 9 Pinkston Drive in the tower block that stood shoulder to shoulder with number 16. The black hackney just needed to turn its neat pirouette, and Reeny would be home in less than a minute. Agnes sat down, lit a cigarette, and knew she would wait long hours before Shug showed his face again. She could feel the burn of Lizzie’s eyes on the side of her face. Her mother said nothing, she just glowered. It was too much to be trapped in your mother’s front room and judged by her, too much to have her be a front-row spectator to every ebb in your marriage.
Soon after Stuart introduces Big Shug, Shuggie's father, to the narrative, Shug offers Reeny a ride home, even though she only lives across the road. He offers the ride in front of Agnes and Agnes's mother, Lizzie. Because of Shug's blatant infidelities, everyone knows he is offering Reeny a ride because he plans to have sex with her. In this passage, Agnes puts up with Shug's cheating while dealing with her mother's judgment of her failing marriage. The moment is significant because it reveals how Agnes finds herself helpless to do anything to stop Shug cheating on her. Instead, she drinks and smokes to preoccupy herself and dull the pain of his abandonment.
With his right hand he reached below her dress and found the soft white parts of her. She crossed her legs below him; he felt the ankles lock one over the other. With his free hand he gripped her thighs and tried to pull the dead weight of them apart. There was no giving. The lock was tight. He dug his fingers into the soft tops of her legs, digging the nails in until he felt the skin burst, until he felt her ankles open. He pushed into her as she wept. There was no drink in her now. There was no fight in her any more. When he was done he put his face against her neck. He told her he would take her dancing in the lights again tomorrow.
In a memory of her and Shug's visit to Blackpool, Agnes recalls how she angered Shug by drinking more than he wanted her to when out dancing. As the couple fights in the hotel, he drags her by the hair up to their room and sexually assaults her. In this violent passage, Agnes recalls how Shug digs his nails into Agnes's thighs until she reluctantly opens her legs. After he rapes her, Shug casually mentions that they'll go out again the next night, as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened. The passage is significant because it reveals the depths of Shug's callousness and the dysfunction and pain Agnes puts up with in their marriage.
Driving slowly all the way to Joanie Micklewhite, he left the windows down and flicked the green air freshener with his forefinger. She would finish her shift soon, and then they could say all the things they could not over the CB radio. He pulled the taxi in tight amongst four or five others and waited for her, slumped forward in his seat, grinning like a daft boy, watching the front door like it was Christmas.
At the end of a chapter written from Shug's point of view, Shug ends his overnight taxi shift by picking up Joanie Micklewhite, the cab dispatcher. In this passage, Stuart depicts Shug's childlike excitement as he waits. The passage is significant because it hints at Shug's affair with Joanie, who elicits feelings in him that the reader has not seen in relation to Agnes or the other women he looks at. With this moment, Stuart foreshadows Shug's abandonment of Agnes for Joanie.
Shuggie would collect the empty cans from around the house and line up the women on the edge of the bath. He would stroke their tinny hair and make them talk to each other in imagined conversations, rambling monologues, mostly about ordering new shoes from catalogues and whoring husbands. Big Shug had caught him once. He had watched proudly as Shuggie lined up the women and spelt out each of their names phonetically. He bragged about it later down the rank. “Five years old, eh!” he would say. “What a chip aff the auld block.” Agnes had looked on sadly, knowing what was really going on. Later that week she took Shuggie into the BHS and bought him a baby doll. Daphne was a chubby little toddler, with the tufted coif of a fifties housewife. Shuggie loved the doll. He put all his lager ladies in the bin after that.
When taking baths with Shuggie, Agnes drinks cans of lager with images of a scantily clad woman on it. He collects the cans, fascinated by the women in a way that makes his father believe he must be a womanizer like Big Shug. However, Agnes knows "what was really going on," correctly perceiving Shuggie's inclination toward things coded as feminine from a young age. One of the few characters in the novel who doesn't judge Shuggie for his difference, Agnes buys Shuggie a doll to play with, not caring that he will be perceived as not masculine because of it.
“Howse aboots some light entertainment?” he asked, mimicking some nonsense from the telly.
Agnes flinched. With her painted nails she cupped his face and squeezed his dimples gently. She pushed until the boy’s bottom lip protruded. “Ab-oww-t,” she corrected. “Ab-OU-t.”
He liked the feeling of her hands on his face, and he cocked his head slightly and baited her. “Ab-ooo-t.”
Agnes frowned. She took her index finger and pushed it into his mouth, hooking his lower teeth. She gently pulled his jaw open, and held it down. “There’s no need to sink to their level, Hugh. Try it again.”
In this exchange, Shuggie mimics a heavy Scottish accent he heard on television. Agnes has a visceral reaction, and instructs her son to pronounce about in the refined "Queen's English" she speaks herself despite being working-class. The passage is significant because it shows how Agnes tries to instill her sense of pride in Shuggie, hoping for him to differentiate himself from other poor people by speaking like an upper-class person. However, Shuggie's style of speaking will later make him the target of bullying as people ask him why he speaks like an old woman.
Her right arm extended gracefully, and she held the glowing cigarette against the curtains. Shuggie watched as the ash started to smoulder and then gave off a grey smoke. He started to squirm as the smoke burst with a gasp into orange flame.
Agnes used her free arm and pulled him tighter towards her. “Shhh. Now be a big boy for your mammy.” There was a dead calmness in her eyes. The room turned golden. The flames climbed the synthetic curtains and started rushing towards the ceiling. Dark smoke raced up as though fleeing from the greedy fire. He would have been scared, but his mother seemed completely calm, and the room was never more beautiful, as the light cast dancing shadows on the walls and the paisley wallpaper came alive, like a thousand smoky fishes. Agnes clung to him, and together they watched all this new beauty in silence.
In another passage that reveals Agnes's self-destructive behavior, Agnes calmly lights the curtains on fire with her cigarette, timing the event with Shug's late-night tea break in the apartment. Shuggie's instinct is to put distance between himself and the fire, but Agnes holds him close to her and assures him to stay put. Trusting her, Shuggie watches the eerie beauty of the room beginning to burn around them. The moment is significant because it is symbolic of what Shuggie and Agnes's relationship will become as she descends deeper into alcoholism and destructiveness. Loving his mother fiercely, Shuggie will stay at her side despite the distress and danger she puts him through.
Agnes coughed again, a dry tickle in her throat that rumbled into her belly and became all at once heavy and thick. The bile was on her lips again. Shuggie stopped running his fingers through her hair and reached for the toilet paper, but something made him stop. He watched her cough. “Suppose maybe Leek was right.” She gurgled again, and her head fell backwards till it rested on the soft back of the chair. Agnes wretched, and he watched the bile bubble over her naked gums and painted lips. Shuggie stood there and listened to her breathing. It grew heavier at first, thick and clogged. Her eyebrows knotted slightly, as if she had heard some news that was unpleasant to her. Then her body shook, not hard, but like she was in the back of a taxi and they were bumping down the uneven Pit road again. He almost did something then, almost used his fingers to help, but then her breath hissed away slowly; it just faded, like it was walking away and leaving her. Her face changed then, the worry fell away, and at last she looked at peace, softly carried away, deep in the drink.
At the climax of the novel, Agnes drinks herself to death in the flat she and Shuggie, who is now a teenager, share. As his mother chokes on her own vomit, Shuggie thinks to intervene and clear her airway. However, he considers that maybe his brother was right when he said that they cannot save Agnes from herself and that she'll never change. As a complicated act of mercy, Shuggie lets Agnes die in front of him, finally accepting that he is powerless to save her.
