Summary
As the Bains’ movers unload their possessions, their new Pithead housing estate neighbors come outside to watch. Bridie Donnelly, the upstairs neighbor, introduces her cousin Jinty McClinchy. The women are curious to know which of the men around is Agnes’s partner. When Shuggie comes over and comments on how the place smells of cabbages and batteries, the women laugh and call him Liberace. Bridie warns Agnes to keep her fancy sleeves away from their men. Inside, the house is disappointingly shoddy, and has only two bedrooms, meaning the children will have to live in one room again. Shug reveals that he is leaving Agnes, who notices then that his red cases have been unpacked. He asks why everything he did for her wasn’t enough to calm her down and stop drinking. She says things like this don’t happen to women like her. Shug tries to wrench her out of her seat blocking him in the kitchen. He knocks her to the floor and his shoe hits her in the chin as he steps over her and leaves.
The narrator comments that Shug takes his suitcases to Joanie Micklewhite’s. He begins returning to the Pithead house at night to have sex with Agnes, then leaving her alone again. Over autumn she waits like this, and insists they can’t return to Sighthill to stay with her parents because Shug will never come back to her there. One night Agnes phones the taxi rank, as she does often. Joanie relays a message to Shug, then apologizes to Agnes, saying she never meant for anything like this to happen, and that she has seven children of her own. Shug comes over that night with Chinese food. She asks why he brought her there if it wasn’t for their fresh start. Shug says he had to see if she would go. The narrator comments that Shug needed to destroy her completely before he could leave her for good. She was too rare to let another man love her.
On her way to the miners' club one day, Agnes stops out front of the houses to drink vodka out of tea mugs with the local women. She shares her cigarettes with them. The women accurately guess that Shug is living with another woman, and ask what she’ll do for money when he’s gone for good. They offer to set help set her up at the benefits office, saying anyone with her address can get on disability benefits. They ask how bad a drinking problem Agnes has. Agnes says she doesn’t have a problem and that the other women are drinking vodka too. They reveal they only have tea in their mugs. The women discuss how some of them were once drinkers but had to stop because of the blackouts. Bridie says she quit drinking but takes Valium. She offers Agnes a pill and tells her to come back to her to buy more at a special price. She goads Agnes to try it, and then welcomes her to Pithead.
Shuggie is out on his own, exploring the desolate area around the estate with Daphne, his dolly. He doesn’t know what day of the week it is, but Agnes didn’t lay out his clothes, so he didn’t go to school. Boys playing on their break at the Catholic school ask why Shuggie doesn’t have a father. Shuggie lies and says he’s earning money for a holiday. Shuggie comes across a boy named Johnny, who is sitting inside an old washing machine. He asks Shuggie about the doll and asks if Shuggie is “a wee poof,” explaining that a poof is a boy who wants to be a girl. Johnny spins Shuggie inside the washer, and Shuggie’s head and shins hit hard against the metal inside until Johnny’s father comes and stops them by striking Johnny. In a bin shed, Johnny rubs docken leaves on Shuggie’s cut leg to clean it. He then asks Shuggie to rub him.
At home, Agnes is shouting obscenities at Joanie into the phone. Leek returns home from the Youth Training Scheme, tired from working with a heavy bag of tools. Through the window, he sees in Agnes’s eyes that she is on a bender. He turns and leaves to walk to his grandmother’s in Sighthill. The narrator reveals that Leek had recently begun watching his father Brendan return home to a stable and happy family of three children. Leek never introduced himself as the men, with their same tired stoop, nodded at each other on the street.
Agnes wakes with a hangover and vomit rising in her throat. She searches for partially full cans and bottles to drink, panicking until she finds a can of beer in her purse. It is Thursday, and she has already spent the thirty-eight pounds in benefits money she gets every week. With the pain of alcohol withdrawal setting in, she takes her good mink coat and a couple of figurines out to pawn them. She gets drenched in the rain and goes into a taxi garage to ask to use the toilet to tidy up the wet coat. After she does, the man running the garage gives her a cup of tea. He guesses she has walked from Pithead to pawn the mink coat for drink money. Agnes claims it isn’t true and that she’ll have to get back to her husband. The man plays along, saying he hopes she’ll find the wedding ring she lost. He asks if she’s been to Alcoholics Anonymous yet. He can tell she’s a drinker because she is shaking. Agnes says if he ever works on Shug Bain’s cab, could he cut the brakes for her? The man laughs and tells her the best thing she can do to get back at Shug is get on with her life.
Two years have passed since the Bains moved to Pithead. Catherine takes Shuggie to meet Donald Junior, her fiancé, and his father, Rascal, Shug’s brother. Catherine plans to move to South Africa with Donald. In the warm house, Shuggie meets his father, who he hasn’t seen in some time. Shuggie is shy and clings to Catherine’s leg. Joanie steps forward to meet Catherine and Shuggie. Shug refers to Joanie as Shuggie’s “new mammy,” but Shuggie thinks of her as “Joanie the hoor,” as Agnes does. Joanie gives Shuggie a pair of roller-skates. For the rest of the evening he tries to wreck the hall carpet by skating around. He listens to the adults discussing Donald’s job supervising Black workers in a palladium mine in Transvaal. He wonders why his sister has to go off and leave him.
Leek climbs the black charcoal slag hills that stretch for miles around Pithead. He sketches the dead marsh and pipe-cleaner trees. The narrator comments on how Leek dreads his apprenticeship with a gaffer, with whom he doesn’t get along. Leek looks at a letter from Catherine in South Africa and feels heartsick. He looks at another letter—his acceptance to a BA program in a fine arts course from two years earlier. Shuggie arrives, complaining that Leek didn’t wait for him. Leek and Shuggie discuss how Shuggie is bullied at school, and Leek sympathizes while simultaneously telling Shuggie to be more like the other boys. He says Shuggie shouldn’t be so swishy when he walks. Leek asks Shuggie to keep watch and then takes a crowbar and bolt cutters from his bag to strip copper wire from the disused mine. He thinks of the art school he’ll attend when he saves enough money from stealing copper. Meanwhile, a watchman runs toward Shuggie, who wasn’t paying attention. He runs away into the peat fields instead of warning Leek. Shuggie hides in a wet depression in the earth. When he tries to walk out, the sinking mud sucks his gumboots down. Leek eventually finds him, and pulls him out. Leek says he had to hurt the watchman, bad, and that it’s all Shuggie’s fault.
The narrator reveals that the watchman was hospitalized because of the crowbar hit to the head. Police ask families in the estate for information, but Agnes does not know Leek did anything. As time passes, Shuggie tries to learn to walk the masculine way Leek taught him. Agnes learns how to break open the electricity meter and retrieve the silver coins she’d put in it. One day Agnes goes across the street to talk to Colleen’s husband Jamesy when Colleen is out. She offers to pay him to take Shuggie fishing with his sons. Jamesy says he doesn’t want her money, but gets her to give him a blowjob. Shuggie gets excited about the prospect of going fishing, but on the morning of the trip, Jamesy drives his truck past Shuggie and Agnes waiting on the curb. Shuggie cries in the backyard while Agnes buys him sweets and beer for herself. She plans to confront Jamesy in front of Colleen that evening, when drunk.
A woman with sunglasses and a red handbag walks to Colleen’s and goes inside. Later, when Jamesy is home, a fight erupts across the road. Jamesy leaves as Colleen shouts at him for cheating on her. He drives off, calling Agnes a “hoor,” and then Agnes goes to comfort Colleen as she lies in the gutter. Colleen says the other woman is named Elaine. Instead of telling Colleen what she had planned, Agnes continues to console her. Colleen has no underwear on and has taken something that is making her increasingly intoxicated. Agnes removes her own underpants and puts them on Colleen, waiting with her until the ambulance arrives.
Analysis
In the beginning of the Pithead section of the novel, it turns out that Agnes had been right to question the provenance of Shug’s red suitcases, which he had packed with only his own belongings and none of the family’s. The symbolic suitcases, which Shug borrowed from his new lover Joanie, never leave the vehicle as the family moves into their new house; instead, Shug reveals to his wife that he is leaving her, citing her acting out and alcoholism as reasons. With this twist of irony, Stuart begins the section with the novel’s most overt act of abandonment.
However, Shug is not content simply to leave Agnes and start a new life. Ensuring that she is psychologically and emotionally destroyed, he takes advantage of her vulnerable state by returning to the Pithead house at night to have sex with her. When his affection makes her believe he will come back to her, he leaves again to sleep at Joanie’s. In this instance of situational irony, Shug inverts his relationship with Agnes. Now, instead of cheating on Agnes with Joanie, he cheats on Joanie with Agnes.
Abused and abandoned, Agnes finds meets her neighbors, who trick her into drinking vodka in the middle of the day under the presence that they had all been drinking vodka out of their teacups. They promise to teach her how to collect social benefits money. Bridie also introduces Agnes to another substance—Valium, a tranquilizer—that she can abuse. Bridie casually offers to become Agnes’s drug dealer, saying she’ll sell Agnes more pills at a special price. In this way, Stuart foreshadows how the women of Pithead, also impoverished and alienated, become enablers who will make Agnes’s battle with substance abuse that much harder to recover from.
With Agnes wrapped up in drinking and self-loathing, Shuggie roams the desolate housing estate, his mother having failed to lay out his clothing for school. The theme of homophobia arises when Johnny, an older boy, uses homophobic slurs to address Shuggie. Although Johnny is hostile in the way he addresses Shuggie, he simultaneously seems to have a fondness for Shuggie. The section ends with Johnny rubbing a leaf poultice on Shuggie’s wound before asking Shuggie to “rub” him. Stuart leaves the moment open-ended, though he implies that Johnny wants Shuggie to touch his genitals. With this turn of events, Johnny’s mixture of affection and homophobia makes more sense, as he himself is learning what to make of his own homosexual desire.
Time passes with the Bains living in Pithead and Agnes’s alcoholism taking a greater toll on her health and finances. Waking one day hungover and broke, she takes her prized mink coat to a pawnshop. On the way, she meets a mechanic who is a recovering alcoholic. He diagnoses her alcoholism based on the way she shakes, and correctly guesses that she is on her way to pawn her good mink coat. The man mentions the possibility of Agnes attending Alcoholics Anonymous, but throughout the interaction Agnes pretends she is not an alcoholic, too steeped in denial to admit she needs help. With this fateful meeting, Stuart introduces the theme of recovery—one of the few themes associated with optimism and health.
The point of view moves away from Agnes as Catherine takes her little brother to see his father for the first time in two years. Shuggie barely recognizes Big Shug, and thinks of his new partner, Joanie, as a “hoor,” the word his mother uses for her. During the scene, Shuggie overhears Catherine’s plan to move to South Africa with Shug’s nephew. Leek, meanwhile, has been apprenticing for a gaffer—work he hates. Artistically gifted, Leek had been accepted to an art school, but stayed with his mother and Shuggie in Pithead, believing it was his responsibility to take care of the family with Shug gone. In need of money for his eventual move, Leek strips copper wire from a disused mining building. However, Shuggie fails to keep watch for the guard, who Leek knocks out with a crowbar. Leek is fortunate to escape penalty, but the experience makes him stop stripping wire.
Hoping to bring an adult male role model into Shuggie’s life, Agnes goes to their neighbor, Jamesy, to ask him to take Shuggie fishing. Jamesy takes advantage of Agnes’s desperation by agreeing to do so in exchange for a sexual favor. Agnes obliges, and Jamesy fails to hold up his end of the deal, leaving Shuggie on the roadside as he goes off fishing. Agnes grows deeply resentful and plans to humiliate the man when he returns, timing her drunkenness. However, in an instance of situational irony, another woman goes to inform Colleen about an affair Jamesy has been having. Rather than wound Jamesy and Colleen, Agnes ends up comforting the despondent Colleen as she writhes in the gutter. Although they are sworn enemies, Agnes suddenly finds Colleen is dealing with the same abandonment and humiliation she herself endured when Shug left.
