Like the exterior view of the Bains’ home, Agnes’s phone serves as another omen of her emotional state. Beside it sits her black book of addresses and phone numbers, which she annotates with nasty asides and epitaphs on drunken nights spent calling anyone she believes has wronged her. The book thus contains her various histories with others, and she uses it and her telephone to take the worst of that history out on others. She calls her ex-husband, Shug, his mistress Joanie Micklewhite, and anyone she has ever suspected of sleeping with her husband. Later, she calls Eugene to pester him at work after their relationship dissolves. She also contacts her drinking buddies, both in Pithead and back in Sighthill, to gossip or angle for more booze when she runs out.
In this way, the phone serves as a symbol of her complicated connection with others, as well as a symbol of her will to keep fighting. The phone is never a tool of positive communication. Instead, it both enables her drinking and enables her to weaponize her pain and loneliness. Often, Shuggie will find the phone dangling from the hook, dead, beside his passed-out mother. These moments are never a relief to him, but merely evidence that she was too drunk to keep going. In fact, one of the most frightening moments that Shuggie and Leek experience is the night Agnes kicks Shuggie out, subsequently sending her telephone to them via cab. Immediately, the boys know that Agnes means this gesture as a goodbye, a surrender to her pain and isolation. While Agnes does not end her life that night, this gesture signifies her waning will to fight, and she dies from her disease not long after this incident.
Agnes’s Phone Quotes in Shuggie Bain
As he climbed the stairs to the hallway he could hear her on the phone. “Fuck you, Joanie Micklewhite. You tell that whoremastering son of a Proddy bitch that he cannot have his cake and eat it too!” Each filthy syllable was enunciated with the alarming clarity of the Queen’s English. “You shitty, dick-sucking bastard. You are as plain and tasteless as the arse end of a white loaf.”
With a slow hand, he pulled the back of Shuggie’s shirt from his tweed trousers and insidiously pushed his fat warm fingers down the back of Shuggie’s underpants. Without looking, Shuggie could tell the man was still smiling at him.
“Aye, you’re a funny wee fella, aren’t ye?”
Leek looked down at the white plastic shopping bag in his arms and undid the knotted mouth. Shuggie watched his shoulders rise behind his ears. Whatever it was, it had turned Leek’s anger into concern; it had scared him almost. Leek put his hand inside and slowly drew out the tan-coloured plastic with its looping spiral tail. “I don’t think this is a good sign.”
It was the telephone from his mother’s house.
It was an end to all contact, a sign she would hurt herself and this time she would not call for help—not to Leek’s gaffer nor to Shug nor to Shuggie. The tinned custard wasn’t a fuck-you to ungrateful sons. She was making sure her baby was fed, and now she was saying goodbye.
Agnes’s Phone Symbol Timeline in Shuggie Bain
