Fleet

Fleet is a small suburban village in the south of England, the place where Bill Denbrough and his wife, the actress Audra Phillips, have taken a rented cottage during the spring of 1985. They are living there while Bill works on his first original screenplay, for a film called Attic Room, which is being shot in the area. The cottage is described as having a tidy little basement with a furnace tucked into what had once been a coalbin, but the British central heating proves inadequate by American standards; on cold mornings, a scrim of ice sometimes forms in the toilet bowl. The south of England is experiencing an exceptionally dank spring, and Bill finds himself thinking of Maine and, in a surprised vague way, of Derry.

The Setting of Bill's Awakening

It is in Fleet, at quarter of eight on the morning of May 28th, 1985, that Bill receives the transatlantic phone call from Mike Hanlon that sets the novel's final events in motion. Bill has just hung up the phone when Audra finds him in the living room, already pouring himself a glass of Glenfiddich before breakfast—a sight that alarms her, as she has never seen him drink at that hour. The cottage's cold floor and the fog nuzzling against the windowpanes frame the conversation in which Bill, for the first time in their eleven-year marriage, tells Audra about his brother George's murder and the promise he made as a child to return to Derry if the horror ever started again.

The Scene of Revelation

Fleet is the place where Audra confronts the hidden spaces between them. She tells Bill what she knows of his past—that he grew up in Derry, that his brother died, that his father died of lung cancer when Bill was seventeen—and then presses him to explain the call. It is here that Bill reveals the scars on his palms, which were not there the night before, and here that his stutter, absent for over twenty years, returns. The cottage becomes the stage for Bill's confession that he has not thought of George in twenty years, that he has forgotten Derry and the friends he chummed with, and that Mike Hanlon's call has opened a door inside him, letting out a horrible light.

The Departure

Fleet is also the place from which Bill leaves. He tells Audra he will take the Concorde from Heathrow to New York, then fly to Bangor and drive to Derry. He makes her promise to stay behind, to carry on with the film and make excuses for him. When she asks when she will see him again, Bill puts an arm around her and holds her tightly, but he never answers her question. The village thus marks the point of separation between Bill's present life—his marriage, his career, his identity as a successful novelist—and the unfinished business of his childhood that has called him back to Derry.