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The bus leaves the Friday traffic in Tours and soon we’re hurtling along narrow country roads that wind through hilly farmland and tiny picturesque villages. Cherry and I sit together.
“Why the Moulin Rouge?” I hear myself ask. The thought of her as a robot dancer doesn’t fit with her bubbly individuality.
“It’s been my dream ever since I was a precocious little princess in Brisbane, all pink leotards and my hair in a bun. I even gave myself a stage name, Cherry Tart. The show-girl-in-waiting, aged five.”
“I saw the show in Paris. It looks like...a lot of hard work.”
“Yeah. That’s the point. If you haven’t got the drive to learn the routines like clockwork – and bare your boobs and parade in a headdress five nights a week – forget it.”
“The vamp keeps the hours of the vampire?”
She nods and laughs.
“Where will you live?”
“Home will be the Moulin Rouge – that’s where my heart is. I still can’t believe I’ve cracked it.”
Her words have a powerful effect on me. She’s about to drop herself into a whole new milieu and surround herself with strangers, but she’s going to make it home. Where her heart is. For the first time I wonder where my heart is. And where was it when I was missing?
“For sleeping,” Cherry continues, “I’ll be slumming it for a while, till I get trained and into the bigger money. For now I’ve got a furnished attic studio in the eleventh arrondissement. Not glamorous. Cheap.”
Just like I imagined. “Up how many flights of stairs?”
She laughs again. “Five. One of those rickety old French staircases. I’ll have to stoop all the way. The bathroom’s on the floor below, sharing with five students.”
“And a padlock on the fridge?”
“Yep. You can’t gain more than a kilo. Are you psychic?”
I realise I’ve been confusing all my nights on spare beds with my sense of homelessness, but they’re just places to sleep. Home is something else, and Cherry agrees with Davina: it’s a place to dance.
But without going back to Bantry’s Bluff what do I do with the insight?
***
The château is at Loches, a charming town nestled in the surrounding hills. In the car park, our small group climbs out of the bus and walks across a drawbridge, the teeth of a huge portcullis rolled up above us. On the other side of the archway, we make our way along the stone blocks of the outer wall towards an enormous turreted fortress. It’s the perfect place to stage a fairytale, and hard to believe people lived here.
Our teacher shows us through a heavy oak door and into vast rooms furnished with enormous dining tables or four-poster beds, each with a fireplace that must have consumed whole trees in one evening, and walls adorned with great tapestries of a trillion stitches. A steep stone staircase spirals upwards into a tower, leading us into a darkened hall. Ushers guide us to long wooden benches opposite a tableau of wax figures shrouded in shadow. It must be cold in here because I shiver. We scan our laminated guide-sheets and put on headphones for an English soundtrack.
“It’s one of Perrault’s tales,” Cherry whispers.
“Perrault?” I ask.
“The guy who invented fairytales. He published a book of folk stories way back – in the 1700s – but he called them fairytales. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots – all the ones you know, they’re all straight from Perrault.”
“I’ve never heard of this one.”
“Me neither. Creepy, isn’t it? Donkey Skin.”
As the title leaves her lips, something happens to my blood flow – a current races through my veins. If I was standing, I’d probably swoon. But before I can wonder, the audience goes quiet and the show begins.
The story is told in a series of vignettes, with spotlights illuminating each group of characters in turn and sound effects accompanying the narration. The king’s wife has died, and to fulfil her wish that he marry a woman as beautiful as her, the king chooses his own daughter. The princess must escape this incestuous proposal, so she consults a fairy godmother – an old woman with gleaming eyes, who lives in a cave. The girl then sets her father a series of impossible demands, hoping to thwart his intentions. The king must produce a gown for her as stunning as the sky, then the moon, then the sun. Each time the king threatens his seamstresses with death, so one after another they produce a gown of exceptional splendour, as the lightshow demonstrates.
The tension in the music escalates as the girl becomes desperate. The fairy godmother instructs her to demand the skin of the king’s favourite animal – a donkey that excretes gold. The princess is sure it’s a demand too far – the donkey is the source of the kingdom’s wealth – but, to her horror, her father kills the animal and presents her with its skin. Now her only option is to run.
The audience gasps as the lighting effects show the princess cloaked in the donkey’s filthy pelt, its head hiding her true identity. She wanders far from home and takes a job in a lowly kitchen, only removing the skin when alone in her room. The lights switch between her private beauty and her ugly outer persona. One day a prince visits the kitchen and spies her radiance through a keyhole. He asks who the beauty is but the kitchen staff laugh. “She’s no beauty, she’s Donkey Skin.”
When Donkey Skin makes a cake for the royal table, her ring slips into the mixture and the prince makes every woman in the kingdom try it on until he tracks her down. Now Donkey Skin can shed her dirty false cloak and fulfil her destiny to marry the prince and be a queen.
Afterwards, as we descend the stone staircase, I lean against the wall for support. I’m trying to make sense of my reaction. Elements of the story are so familiar – the gowns, the animal skin, the whole identity thing, the girl’s need to escape and her resulting homeless state – yet I’ve never heard the tale before. And when the fairy godmother appeared inside her shell-lined grotto, the lighting giving her eyes a sharp knowing look, it was as if I was looking at myself in Tutu’s mirror.
Our little group walks through the maze of narrow lanes inside the castle walls. The evening light is making long shadows.
“I couldn’t take my eyes off those gowns,” Cherry says. “But that donkey skin – God, how revolting.”
I’m admiring the precision of the stone work, trying to pretend nothing strange just happened.
“The story’s like Cinderella in a way,” Cherry goes on. “The princess working in the kitchen, all the women in the land trying on the ring instead of the slipper.”
“Yeah.”
“And Beauty and the Beast in reverse – she can only show her ugly disguise in public, until the prince sees her beauty and breaks the spell.”
“Hmmm.”
“And what did you make of the fairy godmother? Her advice sucked, if you ask me. All those demands. Why didn’t the girl use her own wits? Or just leave?”
“She was trapped. And afraid. That can make you...impotent.” Sometimes for years.
“Impotent,” she says. “Like the old man wasn’t, the randy bugger. So hot for his own daughter he kills a donkey that craps gold. And all because the fairy godmother stirred him up.”
“But Donkey Skin’s father had all the power,” I say, “and those demands exposed how ruthless he was. He was never going to let her go. The demands forced her to face the truth – that her only option was to run.”
“OK. I get that. Sounds like you liked the old woman.”
“I don’t know. When they dimmed the lights, she was in that grotto surrounded by shadows, her eyes glowing. It felt –”
“Creepy.”
That’s not what I was going to say.
***
It’s a matter of life and death. I’m running, running, running from something I cannot see. If only I can cross the sea, I’ll be safe.
Just as panic is tightening my chest, a bridge appears like a rainbow, but a troll lives under the bridge, and if I try to cross he’ll eat me. I rack my brain for three clever questions. If the troll can’t answer one of them, I’ll be free to cross.
“What colour is the sky?” I ask in wonky French. “Bleu,” says the troll.
“What colour is the sun?” I ask. “Orange,” says the troll.
Now I’m desperate. I’ve only got one question left.
“What colour is Selkie Moon?”
“Gris,” says the troll, baring his teeth. Grey. He thinks he’s won but the answer is silver.
“Silver,” I scream, but I don’t know the word in French. It doesn’t matter. He’s going to eat me anyway.
Then something dark descends and I’m wrapped in eerie looming shadows. I think it’s a pursuer, but then I’m crossing the bridge unseen. On the other side, relief flips to horror, then despair. The donkey skin saved me, but now it’s stuck fast and I can’t get it off.