Summary
On the football pitch, Shuggie is picked last, as usual. A boy challenges Shuggie to a fight after school. During the struggle with the boy, another comes in to trip Shuggie and the two gang up, punching him in the face until he is bloody. The crowd is delighted. At home Leek and others have decorated the house for Agnes’s surprise party to celebrate her one-year AA anniversary. Agnes and Eugene come in. As Agnes speaks with her guests, Eugene stands uncomfortably to the side. Shuggie and Eugene speak for the first time. Shuggie asks how long he plans to stay with Agnes, and says he won’t like Eugene if he disappoints Agnes. Eugene eventually leaves, visibly uncomfortable, saying he should drive his cab and make money. Agnes looks at her AA friends and hates that she is so low as to be associated with them. In the bathroom she takes two Valium and smiles at herself in the mirror.
On Shuggie’s eleventh birthday, Big Shug drops off a pair of football cleats he got cheap because they were stolen. He brings a bag of Special Brew beer in a bag for Agnes. He’d heard she was doing well, and she had bruised Shug’s ego by not calling the taxi rank in a year. With reluctance and terse replies, Agnes lets Shug in for tea. He compares her beauty to Joanie’s plainness, her tidy house to Joanie’s cat hair–covered flat. She lets him look around and sends him away. Shuggie returns as his father leaves. Agnes and Shuggie deliver the cans of lager to Jinty. Neither Agnes nor Shuggie comments on how Big Shug tried to come and bring Agnes low again.
After being distant since the AA anniversary, Eugene takes Agnes out. He admits the pitiful state of the other alcoholics gave him a fright, because Agnes seems normal in comparison. He brings her to the dining room of a golf club. He asks if the AA people told her when she’d get better. Agnes says you never get better from being an alcoholic. Eugene orders a bottle of white wine. Eugene tells her she’s different now, and goads her to take a sip of wine, saying it’s what normal people do. She does, and finishes the wine. She feels she has beaten AA now and can be normal. The two keep drinking, try to have sex clumsily in the taxi. Agnes falls in the house's doorway. Leek comes out and screams, beating Eugene with his fists. Shuggie stands before Agnes with tears on his face and his pajamas wet with urine.
Agnes drinks heavily through Christmas, with Leek hiding in his room and Shuggie keeping Agnes away from the door and phone. In the four months since the golf club, Eugene has been coming to the house two to three times a week when Leek is at his apprenticeship. Eugene had apologized for getting her back on the drink and promised to set things right. On New Year’s Eve, Agnes goes to a party without telling Shuggie. Shuggie redials the phone number last called and gets his mother on the line. Though she tells him to go to bed, Shuggie orders a taxi. The driver makes Shuggie sit up front. He gives Shuggie a sandwich and puts his arm around Shuggie’s waist. He puts his fingers down Shuggie’s underpants to his bottom. Shuggie mentions that his father and his mother’s boyfriend are both cab drivers, who he might know. The driver grimaces and pulls his hand out. He drops Shuggie off and tells him not to worry about paying the fare. At the party, Shuggie finds his mother drunk in the bedroom under a heap of coats. Her tights are torn from toe to waist.
Shuggie stays home from school with a hungover Agnes. Since being raped on New Year’s Eve she hasn’t wanted to go out partying. She has lost her job at the petrol station. Agnes sends Shuggie to cash the Tuesday child support stamps. The woman at the benefits office scolds him for not being in school and threatens to take away his mother’s benefits book until he pleads for her not to. Agnes and Shuggie go out to the shop together, where Agnes can’t afford groceries and a twelve-pack of lager. The man takes back all the groceries, and she buys only the beer. Agnes thanks Shuggie for coming with her and he hugs her waist, saying he’ll do anything for her. Shuggie goes out wandering. When he comes home, Agnes is on the floor covered in blood. Leek sits on her chest, weeping, and holding tea towels on her slashed wrists. He tells Shuggie to call an ambulance. Agnes screams, “You don’t love me” to Leek and asks him to let her go. In the hospital, Agnes has bandages over the long, deep cuts. She had phoned Leek’s work on the South Side. She did not plan for him to get there in time to save her.
Shuggie stays at his father’s place while Agnes is in the psychiatric hospital. Shuggie makes note of the dining room and set of stairs to a second floor, knowing he could never tell Agnes how Joanie and Big Shug live. In bed, Shuggie counts all of his father’s children and stepchildren, fourteen in all. Big Shug avoids the house while Shuggie lives there, staying out on double shifts. For three weeks Shuggie kills time on the tower-block estate until his mother arrives. Dressed in her best, Agnes shouts from outside the house for Shug to show himself, calling him a wife-beating “hoormaster.” Agnes throws a metal garbage can through the front window. She demands that Shug bring her son out. Joanie shouts at her and Agnes throws her high-heeled shoe at Joanie’s face. Shuggie jumps out the broken window and goes to his mother’s side. They leave together, and Shuggie lets her make promises he knows she cannot keep.
Eugene lets himself in the house after Leek leaves. Eugene puts canned food in the pantry, as he’s been doing every morning. He makes tea and toast, looks through the newspaper. Agnes has circled ads for house swaps, as she wants to trade her council house for another far away from Pithead. Eventually Eugene breaks up with her when she asks if he’ll move in with them if she moves house. He says he doesn’t like her when she’s been drinking. Shuggie stays home from school for two weeks afterward, keeping Agnes, in her drinking binge, away from the outside world.
One night, Agnes verbally attacks Leek when he gets home, resentful that he’s trying to head out to the gambling machines in the city center. He turns his back to her. She calls him a “wee woofer” and a “ponce,” words that make Leek look at Shuggie. They are words Shuggie hears every day on the streets and playground. Agnes jams her ring into Leek’s back and tells him he is kicked out of the house. Leek’s jaw trembles before he stiffens and gathers his things in a trash bag. While packing, he advises Shuggie to keep some of the money aside for food, to keep men who’ll take advantage away from Agnes, to hide razors and pills from her. He says Shuggie is thirteen, so he’ll be able to leave in not too long. Shuggie asks who will look after Agnes and help her get better. Leek says she’ll never get better and tells Shuggie he can only save himself. He tells Shuggie to make something of himself rather than make the same mistake Leek did.
With Leek gone, every day Agnes’s living room is full of other alcoholics. After three weeks, she wakes hungover and alone. Shuggie tells her he doesn’t want to live there anymore; Agnes concurs. Agnes runs into Colleen McAvennie on the street. The two get into an argument and Agnes admits she “fucked” Jamesy. Later Colleen’s children pester Shuggie, spitting through his letterbox. Francis, an older boy who has tormented Shuggie, claims to want to put differences aside now that Shuggie is moving away. He offers to let Shuggie kiss him if he opens the door. Shuggie asks why he would want to kiss. In the end, Francis puts his lips to the letter box and Shuggie shoves the phlegmy rag he used to wipe up Francis’s siblings spit into Francis’s mouth. Francis shoves a kitchen knife through the letterbox, searching for Shuggie’s flesh.
As they prepare to leave, Agnes sells much of the household possessions to a junkman for cash. She considers the new self she’ll be in the city, promising Shuggie she’ll quit drinking. Agnes pours out the last of the liquor and beer in the house, something she’s never done before when claiming to quit. She says no one will know them in the East End, they’ll be brand new.
Analysis
In contrast to his newly happy home environment, Shuggie continues to deal with homophobic abuse and social alienation at school. After getting punched by other students who gang up on him, he comes home to find that Leek has decorated the house to celebrate Agnes’s first year of sobriety. However, the surprise backfires when Agnes comes home with Eugene, who is uncomfortable to see Agnes associating with recovering alcoholics. Agnes understands his aversion, feeling herself that it is pitiful that her alcoholism brought her as low as the others. To console herself, she takes Valium and feels good again. With this action, Stuart shows Agnes still has to contend with her pride and tendency toward substance abuse.
Having heard that Agnes was doing better, no longer drinking and despondent, Big Shug pays Agnes a visit. Predatory as ever, Shug brings cans of beer with the aim of making her relapse, presumably hoping he can get her drunk and sexually abuse her. With this intention, Shug attempts to continue the vicious codependent dynamic that has characterized their relationship. But Agnes rejects him and delivers the beer to Jinty.
Although Agnes keeps her boundary with Shug, the next challenge to her sobriety is more difficult to overcome. Having felt repelled by Agnes’s association with AA members, Eugene convinces her to take a drink with him to prove that she has more willpower and does not have to brand herself an alcoholic. She can be normal. However, when Agnes obliges, she immediately relapses and goes on a drinking binge. Stuart captures the quick and blurry spiral by describing how she lapses in and out of awareness as she and Eugene get drunk, have sex, then wind up on the floor of Agnes’s house with Leek physically assaulting Eugene and Shuggie peeing his pants.
Drawn back into active alcoholism, Agnes drinks heavily again. Leek avoids her, and Eugene avoids Leek, although Eugene promises to get Agnes sober again. The theme of sexual abuse arises again when Agnes goes off to a New Year’s party without telling Shuggie. Desperate to track her down, Shuggie orders a taxi driven by a man who sexually assaults him by putting his hand down Shuggie’s pants. The assault only stops when Shuggie mentions his father is also a cab driver. The theme continues when Shuggie finally finds Agnes under a pile of coats at the party. Her nylon tights have been ripped at the crotch, presumably by a man who raped her when she was drunk.
Shuggie’s codependent relationship with his mother is on full display when he stays home from school to care for her and undergoes humiliation to cash child support stamps. At the grocery store, Agnes goes through the theater of pretending to buy groceries, all the while knowing she can only afford beer. Despite knowing she is spending their food money on drink, Shuggie hugs her and says he would do anything for her. In this way, Agnes’s alcoholism leads her to exploit her son’s enduring love for her. The theme of abandonment arises again when Agnes attempts to take her life by cutting her wrists. It so happens that Leek gets home in time to save her, but she hurls insults at him, pleading for him to let her die.
Shuggie goes to stay with his father and his father’s new family while Agnes recovers in hospital. However, his allegiance to his dysfunctional mother remains as fierce as ever. When she comes to collect him, smashing the front window, Shuggie jumps through the shards of glass and leaves happily with her. By now he knows she will never keep her promises, but he stands by her regardless. Agnes becomes increasingly dependent on Shuggie as her relationship with Eugene fizzles out and she kicks Leek out of the house. As he leaves, Leek advises Shuggie on how to look after her, but also warns him to not make the same mistake he did by being too concerned with Agnes.
Having lost or alienated the adults who cared about her, Agnes is left with the company of other local alcoholics. After Agnes reveals to Colleen that she had sex with Jamesy, Colleen’s children escalate their bullying of Shuggie, attempting to stab him through the letterbox with a kitchen knife. Realizing Pithead has not been a healthy place to live, Agnes and Shuggie prepare to leave for the city, having traded their council house for a council flat. As with every other time she has moved, Agnes vows to become brand new when she leaves Pithead. To prove her point, she pours out her drinks. Although she has disappointed him so many times before, Shuggie and Agnes share in a moment of optimism.
