The following is from Claire Adam’s Love Forms. Adam’s debut novel, Golden Child, was published by Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP for Hogarth. It was listed as one of the BBC’s “100 Novels That Shaped Our World” and was awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and the McKitterick Prize. She was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She received an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Adam lives in London.

I feel I should clarify about the nuns. When you say “nuns” nowadays, people think of evil, cruel women who starve girls and make them scrub floors—Caribbean nuns aren’t like that. For the most part, they’re cheerful women, busy, active. They run schools, they teach, they find housing for the destitute; they manage kitchens, they pray with the sick, bring food to the poor. And in Trinidad, it used to be the nuns who coordinated the relief efforts—for example, when there were floods, or when an island had been hit by a hurricane.

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I have very clear memories of how it used to work. Our school chapel used to be commandeered as a sort of hub: schoolchildren took part in the effort, and it was like a military operation, organizing huge piles of donations into categories; laying out cardboard boxes at the ends of the pews, and distributing items among boxes. There were other adult helpers—some men, some other religious women—but it was the nuns who were in charge. They wore gray knee-length dresses and simple black veils that covered their hair; and sensible shoes—shoes suitable for walking long distances in any terrain. When hurricanes were coming in, there was a sense of working against the clock, but the nuns were fearless, tireless: they strode up and down the aisles, directing operations, their veils fluttering in the wind. Later, I learned that those same nuns used to take the donations to the airport themselves, and as soon as the sky was clear, they would be out on the tarmac getting the boxes loaded onto the plane. Who knows, maybe they even flew the planes; I wouldn’t put it past some of them.

They weren’t all particularly devout: I think now that they were just capable women—women who saw what needed to be done, and rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. Priests were a little different: they were more inclined to sit and complain about the country going to the dogs. But the nuns did the legwork. Nuns got things done. And nuns were trusted: I don’t know if they even needed things like passports to travel from one island to another, or if they just showed their faces and they were waved through.

In that house in Venezuela, the nuns were all called “Hermana,” pronounced without the H, like ear-man-a. I’m sure there was at least one Hermana Maria: I keep returning to the name “Maria-Theresa,” but I could be making that up. I can’t remember the names of the others. I think there were four of them, or sometimes five; other local women came and went too. I have a recollection of a woman who I now think must have been a midwife, or maybe she was a doctor or nurse. In any case, they were all decent. We were fed; we were looked after. One Hermana was a stern sort of person, but there was none of the cruelty I’ve heard about in other places. And some of the girls cried now and then, but it wasn’t because of the nuns.

I was there for four months, from August to November—long enough, you would think, to still have a clear picture of the place where I stayed, but I only remember fragments. One of the rooms had a black-and-white tiled floor, like a chessboard: I remember that clearly. In the nuns’ office downstairs, there were leafy plants on a windowsill that made the light in that room dim: I remember shade and shadows where there should have been bright sun. And the house smelled of bleach and insect spray, just like Trinidad. In fact, many things were just like Trinidad. There was burglar-proofing over the windows, and beyond the windows there was a view of the crisscrossing flanks of the hills, much bigger than the hills at home, but carpeted in the same dark green as at home, the same thick, wild forest. There were the same noisy, squawking parrots as there were at home, and golden orioles, and hummingbirds who came frequently to the hibiscus; the same thick ropelike vines hanging from branches of the tall trees; the same peeping, whistling frog-calls that went on through the same hours of the night.

From the garden, you came up a flight of steps and arrived at a sort of covered walkway, almost like a long balcony or gallery that ran along the high flank of the house. The bedrooms were up there, with doors onto this long balcony or walkway. Two or three beds in each room; mosquito nets over the beds. A crucifix on a nail hammered into the wall.

When I first arrived, I shared a room with a girl called Salomé. I remember her name because it made an impression on me: I thought it was a name that existed only in the Bible. She was from Peru. I remember her sitting cross-legged on her bed, brushing her hair. I remember that part vividly: the long black hair; thick, shining hair.

The floor on that covered walkway just outside the bedrooms was tiled, and very slippery when it rained. I was there in rainy season: it rained often. Girls picked their way along carefully, barefooted or in rubber flip-flops, pressing their clothing flat against their bellies so they could see down to the floor.

I slipped on that floor on my first morning there. I think it was my first morning: everything was still new and unfamiliar. Probably, someone had spoken a warning about the wet floor, but I hadn’t understood it in Spanish, or maybe hadn’t heard above the noise of the rain beating against the corrugated iron roof. I had followed the other girls out of the bedrooms, but then for some reason I had fallen behind, and when I ran to catch them up, I slipped on the wet tiles and fell. I slid some way along, and crashed into the balcony railing. I began to examine my leg, and I saw, now in daylight, the bruises and cuts that had appeared on my body during the long journey the day before. Inside my body, the baby kicked vigorously. I could feel the sickening gliding movements of the small body pushing against my own organs.

One of the Hermanas came up looking for me—not the stern one. I remember her as being rosy-cheeked and energetic, with glasses; brown-skinned, with very sparse gray hair. She might have been in her fifties. She linked her arm through mine and helped me downstairs, plucking occasionally at my wet clothes. Downstairs, I heard the other girls’ voices, and smelled food—good food: coffee, fried eggs, toast. The nun took me to a room, and opened a cupboard and pulled out clothes on hangers. She held them against my body to see the size, talking cheerfully all the while in Spanish, exclaiming at how nice they would look.

A hot feeling of humiliation spread over my body, thinking of having to strip off in full view of the nun to change out of my wet clothes. She must have understood, because she led me to a bathroom nearby. I remember a toilet cubicle, smelling strongly of bleach, and very dark once the door was closed. There was just enough light from the breeze blocks near the ceiling for me to see what I was doing.

In the dark bathroom, I changed into the dress the Hermana had given me, and folded up my wet clothes. When I came out, I held the little wet bundle out to the nun, as if to ask, What shall I do with these? I must have been crying, because she took my face in her hands and wiped her thumbs under my eyes, and she hugged me and spoke gently in Spanish. And after I had calmed down, she took me to the kitchen, where five or six other girls were seated at a long table. I took my place with them, and someone set a plate of food in front of me.

I know now that I was in Venezuela for nearly four months, but while I was there, it was hard to keep track of time, when every day seemed just like the one that had gone before. The only day that was different was Sunday: when a priest came and said Mass to us in the little prayer room downstairs.

And there were other visitors: we weren’t exactly sealed away from the world, or locked in a prison, or anything like that. A man came to cut back the bush in the garden; a different man came and pushed a lawn mower around. There might have been a different man again who came with a ladder and took away a jack Spaniard nest from the high ceiling, but it’s possible that he was the same man who cut back the bush. (I have a vague recollection that one of the men was deaf, possibly the one who cut the grass. But maybe he wasn’t really deaf; maybe I just misunderstood what someone said as we looked out the window at the man, in black rubber boots, and a bandanna over his mouth and nose, diligently pushing the lawn mower, green flecks of grass flying up and sticking to his clothes.) And the nuns went out in a car sometimes, on some business or other. Once, a girl had to go to hospital: I don’t know where the hospital was, or how they got her there. The girl didn’t come back.

I had brought schoolwork with me: I was supposed to be doing work for my A-levels. I remember sitting at a table somewhere in the house and trying to study. One girl did workouts from a VHS tape. There was a room with a sewing machine; the sound of the sewing machine whirring. And we made beaded jewelry—once, or many times, I can’t remember. We might have been on a patio, or in some open sort of room. On the table, the beads were in plastic packets, and we had to open the packets and empty the different colored beads into bowls, and the girls sat around the table threading beads in patterns onto fine nylon thread, like a fishing wire.

Sometimes children came to the house, and we played clapping games with them, and ran races with them on the grass. And newspapers arrived—not daily, but just from time to time—in big stacks, pressed into cardboard boxes or paper bags. Several times, I was given the job of packing these newspapers away, into the bottom of a cupboard in the nuns’ office, or, when that was full, into an unused bathtub in the bathroom downstairs, the same one where I had gotten changed in the dark on my first morning at the house. I barely looked at the papers: they were all in Spanish, and, in any case, whatever politics or events they talked about seemed to bear no relevance to me, or, in fact, to any of us in the house.

I had never been near a woman in labor before. Whenever it happened, the rest of the girls gathered in one of the bedrooms upstairs—to stay out of the way, or just to be together, I’m not sure. That screaming: it was like listening to someone trapped in a fire. At first we tried to play cards together, but then girls lay on their beds with their pillows over their heads, or prayed, or paced around the room.

The first time, I remember the feeling of relief when the girl downstairs finally went quiet. And then the surprise at hearing the new voice, the baby’s sudden wail. One of the girls in the bedroom closed her eyes and clasped her hands. We went downstairs, quietly, huddling together as we walked.

In the room where it had happened, the girl on the bed was covered with a sheet up to her chin. She looked like a corpse. One Hermana was bundling up some dirty sheets. Another woman I didn’t know was on her hands and knees, wiping the floor with wads of newspaper. Another Hermana was holding the baby in her arms. It was a real baby: you could see movements from within the bundle of blankets. The nun smiled and touched her forefinger to the baby’s cheek. The girl just lay on the bed, under her sheet. She was so still that I thought that she might actually be dead. Her head turned very slightly on the pillow, and her eyes followed where the baby moved.

When my turn came, the pain was worse than I imagined. I don’t know who was there; I don’t know if they gave me anything for the pain. At a certain point, after it was over, I became aware of a rasping sound, like the sound of a saw being pushed back and forth: it was a shock to realize the sound came from me, that it was the sound of my own breath. On the bed, and on the newspaper laid over the floor, there were huge splashes of deep dark red, and footprints made with the same dark red, as if someone had been careless with a can of paint. It was hard to believe that I had been at the center of all this. Not far away, a Hermana was wiping the baby with a towel. The baby was purple-gray-colored, in blotches; wet, smeared in blood and what looked like whitish wax. The legs were folded at the knee, and the folded knees pressed right up against the belly so that they made a dent. The feet were curved, like birds’ feet might be. The fists were loosely clenched, but the fingers moved.

As for myself, all I remember is a sense of shock—that I was still alive, when death had seemed so close. And a bigger, deeper shock too—the same one that many women feel after giving birth for the first time, I think: that sudden dawning of understanding.

The night after the baby was born, I stayed in a different room upstairs on my own. The other girls brought me food, and mugs of hot sweet tea. Downstairs, the baby cried all night. I knew that another lady would come in a car, sometime soon, and take the baby away: I’d seen the lady several times by then—a nice-looking lady, well dressed, efficient, organized. She came with a helper, and in the trunk of her car she had things like boxes of diapers and baby clothes and tins of Klim—all the things you needed for a baby.

When one of the Hermanas came to get me the next morning, I was dressed and ready, waiting to be told what to do. A car was outside the gate, its engine running. The Hermana hugged me and said to go quickly, not to keep the driver waiting. She looked exhausted, with dark bags under her eyes. I remember thinking that with her hair uncovered, she looked just like an ordinary woman.

I set off down the stairs and down the drive, walking slowly. I still looked pregnant, my stomach still bloated and round from where the baby had just been. In fact, when the driver saw me, he switched off the engine and he went inside the house to find the Hermana, to make sure he was taking the right girl. I stood by the car to wait. It must have been early. The morning was fresh and cool, the dew not yet burnt away, and full of birdsong. The house was quiet. The little dog waited with me by the gate, wagging her tail gently. The man came back, hurrying down the drive, and gave me a thumbs-up. Quickly, he got into the front seat and started the car. We had better go, he said; we had to catch the tide, and it was a long drive.

I started getting into the passenger seat in the back, but I hesitated, the car door open, one foot still on the ground. Many times have I returned to this moment in my memory. I was still so close to the baby then: I was only just outside the gate of the house, a matter of forty or fifty yards. The man looked over his shoulder and smiled a reassuring smile, saying in Spanish that it was okay, that I would be safe; that he was going to take me to the coast as the nuns had instructed him; that I had nothing to fear. I mumbled something in response. With one hand, I grasped the back of the passenger seat in front, the warm plastic sliding under my sweating fingers. Doubtfully, I pulled my other leg in, so both feet were in the footwell. My hand reached out for the door, and pulled it shut. I pulled myself forward as if to speak to the driver, but I didn’t know what to say. He put the car in gear and we moved off. I looked over my shoulder, through the window. No one was in the front yard, or on the upstairs gallery. Only the little brown dog who had followed me down the driveway was there, and she wasn’t even waiting at the gate, but already walking back to the house, calmly, as if nothing important had happened.

When I finally got back home—all the way home: up the southern main road, past the oil fields, past the airport, through Port of Spain, and up to our house at the top of the hill—I remember that when I got out of the car—daytime, in the full glare of the afternoon sun—our dogs didn’t recognize me. They barked as if I were an intruder: my mother and father had to push them back. Possibly my father took the dogs around to the back to tie them up, or he put them in the maid’s room, which was just there off the carport. At some point, my mother and I were alone, there in the shade of the carport at the front of the house, and my mother put her arms tightly around me. I stood with my arms at my sides. She held me by the shoulders and gazed into my eyes, as if she thought that, by looking deeply into my eyes, she could see for herself what had happened. She shook me a little, holding me by the shoulders. I stared back at her, mute. Her eyes narrowed. She was saying, without words: Oh, so you’re not going to talk to me, is that it? Is that how it’s going to be?

And then she tried a different tactic: she loosened her grip and she said, in a soft voice, woman to woman, “How was it? It was bad?” And then I spoke, my first words since returning. I said, “Well, it’s done now. That’s the main thing, isn’t it?” I remember that I spoke harshly, that I was full of bitterness. And my mother, her eyes narrowing further, hearing my tone, said, “Yes. It is. And you’re lucky that you have parents who will do so much for you, make all these arrangements, and shell out money, and take you back. Eh? You feeling wrong-and-strong now, but over time, you will think about what you’ve done, and you will see that we were right.” And I stared at her without responding, and eventually said, with restrained sarcasm, “Can I go now?” My mother stepped aside and I went slowly up the steps, the concrete steps that led from the carport up to the front door of the house. I was aware of her eyes inspecting my body as I went. I must have looked a fright. There must have been blood all over me: it was probably the smell of blood that had most terrified and confused the dogs. My stomach was still rounded from where the baby had been. My whole body was fatter, more flabby. My hair had grown; it would have been ragged, windswept, caked with sea grime. And whatever clothes I was wearing must have been darkened and salt-stained with seawater, from when I had gotten out of the boat and clambered through the waves up to the shore.

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From the book Love Forms by Claire Adam. Copyright © 2025 by Claire Adam. Published by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.