Summary
In a hospital, Lizzie smokes a cigarette and holds her husband Wullie as he dies. She blows smoke in his face, knowing how he must miss his cigarettes. Agnes and Shuggie arrive at the hospital. Agnes has been drinking and is rude to the nurses who ask her where she is going. Shuggie asks the nurse questions about his grandfather going to heaven, and apologizes for his mother, saying no one likes her when she drinks. Shuggie says, “So if your body doesn’t go to heaven, it doesn’t matter if another boy did something bad to it in a bin shed, right?” At Wullie’s bedside, Agnes cries theatrically over her father. Lizzie apologizes for having been hard on Agnes about Shug, and tells Agnes to keep going, because that’s what mammies do.
In a flashback to Lizzie and Wullie’s past, Lizzie is at home, taking care of Agnes when she is young. Wullie unexpectedly arrives home from fighting Italians in WWII. He cries as he plays with Agnes. Lizzie almost doesn’t recognize Wullie because of how tan he is. She gives Agnes some ham and cake to keep her occupied in another room and then steps out of her underwear and has sex with Wullie. As they finish, an infant in a crib in the corner of the room cries. Wullie approaches it. Lizzie wonders how she could have forgotten when she has lost so much sleep worrying about the child. Just then Wullie’s friends burst in the door with drinks and food to celebrate his return. In the morning, Lizzie thinks about how her affair with Kilfeathers, the greengrocer, had started. Wullie puts on a suit and takes the Kilfeathers child in his arms. Lizzie says she did it to get extra meat rations. Wullie says he doesn’t need to know, and apologizes for being away so long. He leaves with the baby and returns empty-handed in the evening. When Lizzie asks where the baby is, Wullie says, “What baby?”
Wullie dies of lung cancer. Agnes calls her mother while drunk and rails against her for telling her the story of Wullie making the baby go away, saying she ruined Agnes’s memory of her father. Lizzie dies within a month of Wullie, having seemingly stepped in front of a bus. Over her open coffin, Agnes asks for God’s forgiveness. Leek phones Catherine’s in South Africa from Agnes’s phone. Catherine doesn’t want to talk to Agnes, and she isn’t allowed to know Catherine’s number. Leek shares the news and then ends the call with Agnes reaching for the phone to speak to her daughter.
Agnes wakes up hungover. Shuggie has prepared three mugs for her: tea, water, and leftover bits of beer from around the house to soothe her nerves. Agnes recalls bits of the night before, when she got drunk at bingo and a taxi driver sexually assaulted her on the drive home. She vomits over the bucket Shuggie left for her. Jinty arrives, offers to make Agnes toast, and looks through the kitchen for alcohol. Agnes says there’s a can behind the bleach under the sink. Jinty splits it between them, claiming she’s just doing it to soothe Agnes. Jinty, after learning Agnes has nothing else and no money, reveals three cans of beer in her purse. Agnes tells Jinty she was raped the night before, showing her bruises. Jinty laments how awful it is to take advantage of a woman like that but immediately asks about money for more beer.
Jinty invites a man named Lambert over to meet Agnes, asking him to bring a six-pack and a bottle of liquor for them. She tells Agnes to cover her bruises with makeup and make herself “more appetizing.” Lambert arrives and they drink more. Jinty makes a joke about Agnes being attracted to taxi drivers. Agnes feels cold and thinks of her bruises. Jinty bullies Agnes into dancing with Lambert, and then kissing him. He is young, and shorter than her; he makes Agnes think of Leek. Lambert kisses her and touches the bruise on her tailbone, making her vomit just as Shuggie comes in the door. Lambert leaves in a huff while Jinty takes the last of the beer and cigarettes.
Shuggie pretends to be interested in playing football (soccer) at school, running for the ball but never kicking it. When a boy fights Shuggie, a tough girl named Annie intervenes and pulls Shuggie away. She brings Shuggie to the caravan she lives in with her father, who is an alcoholic. Annie has met Shuggie’s mother because she has come to the caravan. Annie says he should fight for her when people gossip about her. Inside, Annie’s father is incapacitated. Annie casually asks if Shuggie really touched Johnny’s “wee man” and says she has touched the genitals of several high school–age boys, despite being ten. Shuggie thinks of his mother in the stinking caravan with Annie’s father and asks why girls always let boys do whatever to them.
The narrator comments on how Shuggie has developed digestive cramps just before it is time to leave school and head home. He is worried about what state Agnes will be in. Sometimes she gets him to act as her secretary, phoning different men who have wronged her so she can shout at them. He has come home to find her with her head in the oven and the gas on. Often wet-haired men—the Pit uncles—are there with cans of beer and bars of chocolate. Shuggie puts on the TV to watch cartoons and thwart their plans to have a dirty afternoon with his mother. The Pit aunties came over to keep miserable company and complain about the men who ruined them. Jinty is the worst of them. One day, she suggests trying to get Shuggie into the special needs school her daughter attends. Shuggie knows Jinty is trying to get him out of the way during the week so Jinty can drink with Agnes more. Shuggie attacks Jinty, seeming to black out as he breaks her big toe by twisting it.
One day Shuggie comes home and Agnes smells like fresh air and soup. The house is clean and warm and she has food ready for him. She is sober. The narrator explains that Agnes has attended AA meetings in the city center, where no one would know her. Men from the local meetings would visit her in Pithead. The Dundas Street meeting on Tuesday night has the anonymity Agnes needs to maintain her pride. When she introduces herself, the group leader comments on how Saint Agnes was in flames, but could not be burned. He launches into a speech about how that was what it was like for him when he was drinking: on fire but not dead. He says Agnes can rise from the ashes again. A woman taps Agnes on the shoulder and says the “fuckin’ men” beheaded Saint Agnes when she wouldn’t burn.
After three months sober, Agnes gets a night shift at a petrol station. It helps her not to drink from loneliness and resentment. Cab drivers spend their breaks talking to her through the glass, asking her to reach for things on the low shelves of the shop so they can see her skirt sketch over her backside. After a couple months she meets Eugene, a red-headed ox-like driver. One night, he takes her on a date to a Western-themed dance bar. She orders a Coca-Cola, claiming drink doesn’t agree with her. Eugene says his wife died of cancer.
In the bar, Eugene reveals that Colleen is his younger sister. Agnes realizes he has heard the community gossip about her being an alcoholic, a bad mother, a “hoor.” They dance, and Eugene asks if it is difficult being off the drink. She says you never win over it, but that’s why she has her meetings. She fantasizes about the security a man like him could give her. They kiss. Times continue to be good for Agnes, Shuggie, and Leek over the summer. Agnes puts music on one day and convinces Shuggie to dance. He is reluctant, and claims he can’t, but with her encouragement, he starts moving and finds he is helpless to stop.
Analysis
The atmosphere of abandonment and grief deepens for Agnes when she loses her parents within a month of each other. In a rare moment of tenderness between Agnes and her mother, Lizzie apologizes for having disapproved of Agnes’s relationship with Big Shug. She impels Agnes to persevere through hardship, just as Lizzie herself did when she was younger.
The narrator digresses to a time when Lizzie was raising an infant Agnes. Wullie unexpectedly returns from fighting in WWII. He is so tan from serving in Africa that Lizzie doesn’t recognize him initially. The narrator reveals that Lizzie has had another child while Wullie was away. To secure more food for herself and Agnes, Lizzie had an affair with Mr. Kilfeathers and got pregnant. Without explaining himself, Wullie makes the child disappear somehow, leaving Lizzie and the reader to wonder what he did to get rid of it.
To learn of her father’s extreme and callous act of abandonment leaves Agnes even more despondent, and she resents her mother for having told her the story, thereby ruining the pure and rosy image she held of her beloved father, who she now thinks of as monstrous. To report the losses of both grandparents, Leek phones Catherine in South Africa on a number Agnes is not allowed to have. Agnes wants to speak with her daughter, but Catherine has severed contact with Agnes.
The theme of codependency arises with the description of how Shuggie prepares three mugs for his mother to use when she wakes up hungover. Assuming responsibility for her, Shuggie makes sure she has water, tea, and a bit of alcohol to drink when she wakes, knowing, even though he is a child, that it will soothe her alcohol withdrawal symptoms. The theme of sexual assault enters the story again as Agnes recalls how a taxi driver took advantage of her intoxication the night before and raped her before bringing her home. Jinty feigns sympathy for a moment, but when she asks if there’s any money for beer, it is clear Jinty’s alcoholism impedes genuine human connection and she can only think about how to secure more drink. Exploiting Agnes’s sex appeal and ignoring the fact Agnes was raped only hours before, Jinty invites a man over to meet Agnes, telling him to bring something to drink. In this way, Jinty has an inconsiderate and predatory attitude toward Agnes that worsens Agnes’s chances of recovery.
As Agnes’s alcoholism grows more extreme, Shuggie dreads coming home from school, never sure in what state he will find his mother. He has come home to witness Agnes attempting suicide. He often comes home to find predatory local men who ply her with drinks in the hopes they can have sex with her when she is drunk. Shuggie tries to put himself in the way of these men to thwart their plans. Seeing Shuggie as a nuisance who stands in the way of Agnes and her drinking freely, Jinty threatens to get him sent to a boarding school. Shuggie reacts by attacking Jinty.
However, just when things are at their worst, Shuggie comes home to discover his mother isn’t drunk and the house is clean. The narrator reveals that Agnes found an AA meeting in the city center where she can be truly anonymous. Having found sobriety through the recovery support group, Agnes humbles herself by taking a job at a petrol station. While working, she meets Eugene, a widower. Agnes downplays her alcoholism when with him, but in an instance of situational irony, it turns out that Eugene is Colleen’s brother. Despite knowing of the hateful rumors about Agnes, Eugene accepts her, and the two fall for each other. The positive atmosphere around Agnes lifts Shuggie’s and Leek’s spirits as well. Stuart shows how Agnes’s recovery helps to smooth over all the harm the family has endured.
