A Roast on Sunday Read Online Free PDF Page A

of marriages, children, divorce, infidelity scandals and sickness. The women were as tight as knots in a rope and nothing had or ever could come between them, although over the years some had tried. Husbands, lovers and children had long resigned themselves to coming in second fiddle behind the friendship.
    The four women were beauties in their time, envied and despised by some and admired and desired by others. They were a law unto themselves and refused to be dictated to by society. When others wore their hair prim and curled short around the ears like the queen, the four of them wore theirs loose and carefree around their shoulders. When the fashion called for wing tipped eyelids and dark stained lips, they wore nothing but a dusting of golden tan across their cheekbones and the sparkle of life in their eyes. Their lips curled knowingly with secrets only they knew. It infuriated the other women.
    Every now an d then the four of them left everything and took off up into the hills that rimmed the lake for a night or two. For years it had been a mystery as to what they were up to, and rumours swirled around lamp posts.
    “They’re up to no good,” the towns’ women sniffed piously some forty years previously. “What kind of a woman leaves her husband and children to fend for themselves while they get up to god knows what in the hills. Mark our words, those girls are meddling in something dark, like witchcraft.” This was meant to scare the men and curb their curiosity, but it had the opposite effect. Immediately their eyes glazed over as they pictured the women dancing naked under the moon.
    Finally, one bright moonlit night back in the late fifties, a group of men had got wind that Dot and the others were planning on heading bush, and they banded together and told the wives they were headed to the lake for a spot of night fishing. Instead, they lay in wait under the ferns at the edge of the path that led up to the hills and when the four women passed by they followed them, from a distance by which they could still hear the women laughing but which they hoped would keep them unseen. The men were whipped into a fever of expectation; near quivering with the possibilities of the delights and wantonness they were to be privy to that night.
    The quivering however, only kept them warm for so long, and after that they nearly froze to death out in the cold trees and undergrowth.
    The women went into a large cave, the entrance to which was obscured from the casual eye by thick vegetation. Once inside they soon got a fire going, and from their hiding spot the men could only watch the flames dance merrily and long for the warmth they offered.
    And that was it.
    There was no nakedness, and no dancing.
    To the men’s immense disappointment n ot one single act of wanton behaviour took place.
    There was only the clink as a bottle of whiskey was passed from woman to woman, the strumming of a guitar and the murmur of voices pierced by the occasional snort of laughter.
    The men waited all night , trying to catch a glimpse of something, anything, that would make losing all sensation in their toes, (in some cases permanently,) worthwhile. But the next morning they headed home, disappointed and dejected, to face the fury of their wives.
    For Dot, Hazel, Lois and Esme, their time in the cave was simply a chance to escape from the everyday struggles of life. Hazel’s aunt Jemima had used the cave for the very same thing with her own girlfriends, and before she died she took Hazel and showed her where it was and told her to always remember that when your husband and children drive you to drink, a best friend will always be right there drinking alongside you. “A best friend,” her aunt Jemima used to say, “will always be there for you, even when you’ve told them to get lost.”
    Dot and the others loved their husbands, for the most part. And they adored their children just as a mother should. But every woman needs an escape from it now