Shuggie Bain

One summer evening, Big Shug gets ready. He is a cabbie, driving his black hackney taxi on the night shift all over Glasgow. Agnes thinks he over-dresses for his work. In reality, he hopes to pick up women leaving the night clubs across town. Instead, he picks up an “auld Glasgow jakey,” who, like other alcoholics, takes a painfully long time looking through his pockets for coins he would rather spend on alcohol. He then picks up a middle-aged woman whose husband has been laid off after 25 years at the iron works; she won money at bingo and is generous with her tip. Shug reflects that the city has changed, and that “Glasgow was losing its purpose” and “Men were losing their very masculinity” (43).

Joanie Micklewhite, the taxi company dispatch, radios Shug to tell him someone has requested him for a pick up in Stobhill. It is Ann Marie, his 24-year-old lover. He admonishes her that they must be discreet, lest Agnes find out, and they have sex in his cab.

After he leaves Ann, Shug gets another call from Joanie, telling him to call home now. Agnes answers, drunk, claiming she knows everything. Shug knows she is “sat at the pleather phone table in the hall, just drinking and waiting and drinking” (46). He tells her to stop calling the dispatch office, or else he might lose his job. After they hang up, Shug breaks the phone booth in a rage.

To calm himself, Shug visits Joe DiRollo’s fish and chips shop. They discuss the declining state of the local prostitutes, and Joe asks if Shug is still interested in renting a house. Shug tells him to hang on to the flat for him—he has to make sure things are set and convince Agnes. He leaves and, at the end of his shift, goes to meet Joanie Micklewhite.

Agnes sits with Shuggie, drinking lager, after their bath together. Shuggie used to like to play with the empty cans because they had pictures of pretty women on them, but Agnes bought him a doll, which replaced the cans. Agnes tries to get him to speak “proper” English, rather than with a Glaswegian accent. Shuggie and Agnes dance to cassettes played on the alarm clock Shug bought her with petrol coupons. Agnes complains about their life in the cramped sixteenth floor flat. She listens to her parents in the other room and feels like a teenager stuck at home.

To cheer herself up, Agnes asks Shuggie to dance for her. Shuggie is eager to please his mother: the harder he dances, the more she laughs. Big Shug, returning home for a tea break, quashes their mirth. She hears her parents greet him. Agnes suddenly sweeps everything off of her dresser, onto the floor, and begins sobbing into Shuggie’s hair. Shuggie sees her makeup is disorderly and that “suddenly the woman was no longer whole, just a mess of different layers” (54).

Agnes holds a lit cigarette to the curtains she hates; it quickly goes up in flames. She holds Shuggie close and tells him, “Shhh. Now be a big boy for your mammy” (55). As the room fills with smoke, Shug bursts in and throws the flaming curtains out of the window. He beats down the rest of the fire with wet bath towels.

Shug gives Shuggie to Lizzie and Wullie. Agnes lies motionless on the bed, unresponsive. When Shug manages to wake her up with pinching and prodding, she puts the ragged cigarette back in her mouth and asks him where he’s been.

Catherine watches Orangemen, Protestant protesters, parade around the city center. She works as an assistant to the director of a credit-lending firm—which both she and Shug regard as a good first job. Lizzie wants Catherine to marry a Catholic boy. Shug, meanwhile, tries to push his nephew, Donald Jr., on her. Catherine finds Donald Jr. to be attractive. From almost the moment they met, he’d tried to sleep with her, but Catherine wants to wait until marriage. Consequently, he proposed to her on her on her seventeenth birthday “in a showy scene that was more about him than it ever was about her” (59).

When she gets back to the tower block where they live, Catherine sees the burnt curtains in the courtyard. Knowing something happened at home, she turns back to look for Leek.

When he is not at home, Leek spends his time in a hideout he made in a stack of pallets in a nearby factory. Inside the factory, local kids accost Catherine, sticking a knife in her mouth, threatening a Glasgow smile and a sexual assault. They stop when they recognize her as Leek’s sister.

Catherine finds Leek’s hideout in the pallet stacks. Leek has furnished the hideout with carpets and other basic hideouts. When Agnes takes to drinking on a Thursday, Leek would hide out there all weekend.

The siblings discuss their mother’s drinking. Agnes had been drunk since lunchtime. Leek says he is done feeling bad about his mother’s habits. Catherine looks through Leek’s sketchbook: at age 15, he is already a talented artist. Catherine tells him that they will get out of their situation, but Leek accuses her of wanting to leave with Donald Jr. Catherine points to the black horizon, and she tells Leek that she heard Shug saying they will be moving somewhere out there. 

Agnes awakens, hungover and confused, as the events of the previous night come back to her. She sobs in a self-pitying way as she remembers. In the kitchen, only Shuggie is happy to see her. Wullie tells Agnes her problems are his fault for being too soft on her; he came from a family of 14, and he never wanted her to struggle like he did. Wullie, despite Agnes’s age, decides to give her a whipping with his thick leather belt. Lizzie joins Wullie in prayer as he whips Agnes’s buttocks again and again.

After the fire, Shug went out for his night shift and never came back. Agnes wonders what woman he is with as she folds his laundry. Agnes decides she needs to show face, so she heads out to the courtyard of the apartment block towers. Shug’s cab is nowhere in sight, and she recalls how she caught him in the act of cheating on her in the taxi, only to realize that he wanted her to see.

Lizzie and other women sunbathe in the courtyard. Lizzie is annoyed with Agnes. She tells her that she has never seen Wullie raise a hand in anger and that Agnes’s behavior is beginning to tarnish the family’s name. Friends and acquaintances ask her about Agnes’s “wee problem,” implying that word has spread about her alcohol abuse (79). Lizzie complains that Agnes should have stayed married to her first husband, Brendan McGowan, the Catholic.

With a cigarette as a peace offering, Agnes endears herself slightly more to her mother. She asks her to tell Wullie that she, Shug, and the kids will be moving. Agnes believes that if they do not move, she will lose Shug; Lizzie is skeptical. She warns Agnes, “He’s going to take you out there to the middle of nowhere and finish you for good” (83). As Wullie and Shuggie come walking up the street, Lizzie tells Agnes to make Shug do right by Shuggie. She indicates that Shuggie playing with a doll is not right. 

Agnes and Shug pack their belongings. Seeing the suitcases reminds Agnes of when she left Brandon McGowan when Leek was still an infant. She had spent the day packing the things she had purchased with her husband’s money, waiting for Shug. After packing everything into Shug’s car, Agnes told Catherine and Leek they are not allowed to cry, and she awakened Brandon. She told him they were leaving.

In the car, Shug admitted he was late due to having second thoughts about leaving his four children and his wife, who threatened to gas all of them. Agnes began to sober at Shug’s description, and she tried “not to think of the trail of fatherless children and the childrenless father they were leaving in their wake” (88). The excitement of a new life was already beginning to leave Agnes. She suggested they could go to her mother’s new flat.

Brandon McGowan tried to get Agnes back and sent child support for three years. He had frequent visitations with Catherine and Leek until Catherine introduced herself to a friendly woman at an ice cream parlor as Catherine Bain. Brandon got up and left, and that was the last Catherine and Leek saw of their father. Agnes had at last found his breaking point.

Agnes makes sure they are all wearing their best clothes before setting off. They give Lizzie and Wullie an awkward goodbye. On the road, Agnes looks forward to having a house of her own and a garden for the children. They drive for a very long time. Shug describes their destination: it is a small coal mining town, where the men earn enough but their wives can stay home, and there are no pubs around. Agnes begins to worry, wondering what they will be able to do for fun.

They drive into a countryside of burned looking hills, passing a concrete coal processing plant, where working men mill about, their clean hands and faces showing their unemployment. They reach their destination, a collection of “the plainest, unhappiest-looking homes Agnes had ever seen” (95). Even Shug looks disappointed. Agnes takes a large chug from a hidden can of lager before leaving the car.