Queenie tries swimming at Brockwell Lido

Queenie Jenkins’s attempt to swim at Brockwell Lido turns a practical outing into a crisis of belonging and, eventually, a difficult moment of recognition. What begins with encouragement from Darcy Betts and the purchase of a swimsuit ends with Queenie overwhelmed outside the pool, calling Janet, and tracing her distress toward pregnancy and her relationship with her mother. The episode does not offer an easy recovery: Queenie identifies a possible breakthrough while acknowledging that she still feels bad.

Invitation and Preparation

Darcy Betts suggests Brockwell Lido for a hot day and explains that Simon has hidden her phone because she was being uncommunicative. Queenie responds that she is already on her way. The plan is modest but significant: swimming offers a chance to do something outside the patterns of withdrawal and distress that have been narrowing her life. She buys an ugly but functional swimsuit at Sports Direct and asks Darcy to wish her luck. Her brisk message makes the outing sound decided; the events at the pool reveal how much effort that decision requires.

The attempt follows a night of unusually long sleep. Queenie’s grandmother wakes at the end of her bed, says she had not known Queenie was suffering so badly, and pats her foot before encouraging her to sleep again. Queenie does sleep for hours, waking eventually because she is not allowed to miss meals. This moment of care does not remove the distress, but it places the outing within a period when Queenie is visibly struggling and her family is beginning to recognize it.

Entering the Pool

At the pool, a girl says the water is too cold and calls Queenie mad for going in. Queenie answers with forced cheer and makes her way inside. In the changing room, the first obstacle is not the water but the feeling of being conspicuous. The room is full of women with different body shapes, yet Queenie sees no one like herself and no other Black woman. She stresses the contrast between that absence and the pool’s location near Brixton: proximity to a Black community does not make the space feel representative or welcoming to her.

Her anxiety takes the form of close attention to her body and to imagined scrutiny. She breathes slowly, removes her dress quickly, and checks whether anyone is looking at her thighs. No one appears to be watching, but the absence of an actual audience does not quiet her expectation that people will react with horror when she reaches the pool. She wraps a towel around her waist and holds her arms close to her sides to limit their movement. The sequence shows how anticipated judgment shapes her conduct before anyone has openly judged her.

Confrontation and Panic

At the pool, Tabitha calls herself a sea monster, reaches over, and pulls Queenie’s hair, also calling Queenie one. Queenie asks the accompanying adult whether she is going to let the child behave that way. She raises her voice partly to conceal its trembling. Rather than feeling defended, she hears the adult say they had better leave and that she will not be attacked at her local pool. Queenie scrambles up and says, “I don’t fit here anyway.” The encounter has turned an act of hair-pulling and a failed appeal for intervention into a confirmation of her fear that the space is not for her.

As she leaves through the turnstiles, Queenie locks eyes with a family and then looks around at strangers. She reads their stares as hatred and concludes that none of them wants her there. Dread rises through her body and her stomach lurches; then the voices around her grow so loud that she covers her ears. She half-collapses, half-sits on the grass, head between her knees, while intrusive thoughts intensify alongside the sound. The scene’s movement—from trying to enter the pool to being unable to bear the surrounding voices—makes the panic physical rather than merely an account of unhappy thoughts. Eventually she finds her phone and calls Janet.

Queenie tells Janet that she did not fit and would never fit, then gathers several earlier experiences of rejection into the same broken statement: Roy did not want her in his house, Tom did not want her, and her mother had not protected her. Her jagged breathing interrupts the words. After a pause, Janet’s voice reaches her again; Queenie says she thinks she is okay, and her breathing returns to normal. The immediate change is limited but concrete: she can continue speaking, and the thoughts that emerge are no longer only about the pool.

A Difficult Recognition

Queenie tells Janet that she has been thinking about her mother and asks whether becoming pregnant could have brought her “mum issues” back to the surface, helping explain why her distress returned and why she stopped caring for her life. Janet suggests that pregnancy, whatever a person chooses to do, is the kind of life event that can have an effect. This exchange does not settle the causes of Queenie’s crisis; it gives her a question through which to reconsider its timing and the feelings she had kept apart.

Queenie then describes seeing her mother not only as someone who should have protected her, but as a person who suffered. She recalls the consequences of her mother’s life with Roy: having no house, living alone in a hostel, losing friends through her relationship, pursuing a court case to recover her money, and becoming so fragile that she could not work. Queenie remembers that after Roy threw them out, her mother had been unable to get through a day of work. She recognizes a resemblance between her mother’s collapse and her own, but turns that recognition into blame, saying that this time she is responsible and has done it to herself. She ends the call, attributing some of her state to possible heatstroke; the dark thoughts have quieted, though unease remains.

Afterward, Queenie tells Darcy Betts that she thinks she had a breakthrough at the Lido, immediately qualifying the claim: she had expected it to feel good, but it did not, and she still feels quite bad. That qualification defines the episode’s significance. The outing does not resolve Queenie’s panic, make the pool feel safe, or deliver uncomplicated relief. It does, however, lead her from an immediate sense of exclusion toward a painful connection between pregnancy, her mother’s suffering, and her own self-understanding.