The council had arranged the carol event with its usual municipal cheer: a modest budget disguised as “rustic charm,” a volunteer choir that had rehearsed all of six times, and the imported miracle of German market stalls — which is to say: sheds. Wooden, lantern-lit sheds, each manned by enterprising persons of indeterminate Mittel-European origin, ladling out mulled wine that tasted faintly of disinfectant and cost five pounds a cup. The English, being English, received this as a seasonal good: Ah yes, glühwein — the foreign cousin of Ribena with a drinking problem.
It was evening, which in December meant dark, and not just ordinary dark but the ceremonial dark of the British festive calendar — the kind of dark that enhances fairy lights while extinguishing everything else. Families drifted toward the bandstand the way iron filings arrange themselves around a magnet: obediently, unconsciously, and with a vague sense of duty. This was society, in its annual, soft-focus incarnation.
Alan and Melinda arrived first. Paul and Claire found them shortly after, and the men immediately fell into the kind of conversation that only men with disposable incomes and buried anxieties can have: FIRE. Financial Independence, Retire Early — the cult of the spreadsheet ascendant. The religion of terminal spreadsheet optimisation.
Paul, with his usual breezy fatalism, was mid-way through a monologue about compound interest when Melinda interrupted.
“Oh, honestly,” she said, with her crisp little laugh — a laugh sharpened by Pilates and privilege. “You two sound so lazy. Retire early? Alan, how would you afford the kind of lifestyle I like without work, dear? What would you do — become my full-time manservant?”
Alan gave the automatic laugh of a man being gently humiliated.
“Well,” Paul said, “I’m going in the opposite direction, actually. Promotion came through on Tuesday.”
This, of course, was the real point — the conversational payload.
“Pushed my FIRE date forward five years. Three years to go now. Might be able to hang up the boots by forty-seven.” He sipped his glühwein, savouring not the taste — impossible — but the announcement itself. “Feels good.”
Alan felt something give way inside him — silently, like a ligament stretched past tolerance. His smile took on the strained, dentist’s-chair quality it always adopted when Paul disclosed yet another triumph. Paul, who seemed to coast through life like a man in a perpetual tailwind. Paul, who made success look accidental, or worse, effortless.
“Oh,” Alan said. “Lovely. Well done, mate.”
The mulled wine steamed between them like a sacrificial offering.
They drifted deeper into the park, discussing the carols, the pleasant turnout, the “community feeling.” The choir screeched its way through “Once in Royal David’s City,” and everyone pretended not to hear the chromatic, off-key notes. Children ran in small, hysterical constellations. Families smiled with practised benevolence. The warm glow of civic virtue hovered above the gathering like breath in the cold air.
And yet, on the park’s outer ring — visible, if you bothered to look — were the cars. Three, possibly four. Dark shapes with steamed windows. Human outlines inside, half-glimpsed. People living in their vehicles, huddled in sleeping bags, performing the nightly ritual of survival within the perimeter of this festive idyll.
A child noticed one of the cars. Tugged at a sleeve. Pointed.
The adults collectively developed ophthalmic conditions and saw nothing.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Claire said, admiring the twinkling lights. “You do wonder, don’t you? Who says society’s dead?”
“Exactly,” Melinda said. “Look at us all — together, in the cold! It’s beautiful.”
Alan nodded, though his stomach gave a queasy lurch. Something about the cheer — the curated, inflatable cheer — repelled him tonight. Or perhaps it was Paul’s promotion. Yes, almost certainly that.
They stayed another half-hour, performing their social duty with the mild heroism of comfortable people willing to endure mild discomfort. Then, with hands numbed and feet frozen, they parted ways.
Back at the car, as soon as the doors shut and the illusion of community evaporated, Alan exploded.
“For God’s sake,” he said, slamming the heater on. “I hate him. I mean it. I actually hate him. He always has to drop it in, doesn’t he? ‘Oh, did I mention my promotion?’ At a Christmas carol event, of all places! Can we not talk FIRE for one evening?”
Melinda rummaged in her bag for lip balm, unimpressed.
“Oh, don’t be silly. Paul’s harmless.”
“Harmless? He’s the biggest bloody show-off in Surrey.”
“Well,” she said, applying the balm with cool precision, “he did get promoted.”
Alan stared through the windscreen at the dark, parked silhouettes lining the edge of the park — the cars the others had so pointedly un-seen. He felt something corrosive move in his chest. Not pity, not even guilt — something else. A sense of misalignment, perhaps. A sense that his own life was sliding sideways.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “He did.”
The heater wheezed into life, blowing warm, stale air at his face, but it didn’t help. The dryness in his throat persisted. The familiar pressure — a sort of moral indigestion — lodged itself behind his sternum.
He drove home in silence, feeling the quiet tighten around him like shrink-wrap.
The season of goodwill had begun.
And he was already tired of it.