Girl of My Dreams

I remember the magazine section of the Waterstones in Nottingham, where I grew up, as being especially good. The bookshop’s Victorian building sits on a corner and its magazines were on the fourth floor, set into the narrow point where the two streets meet. Spanning floor to ceiling shelving, the collection seemed wildly comprehensive and cosmopolitan to us then. In reality, it was probably the same as all the Waterstones branches, and the magazines were abundant only because magazines used to be. 

Whatever, it is there in my mind: crowned. 

Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, when our Saturday jobs at greengrocer’s and sandwich shops had given us our first taste of purchasing power, my friends K and S and I spent an excessive amount of time and money there; at weekends, after school, and, most pleasingly, during school, when we were supposed to be in P.E. After visiting, we would sit and leaf through our spoils in the independent cinema around the corner, where coffee refills were free and you could still smoke inside.

When I think about that period of time, and try to pin down its aesthetic—what my bedroom looked like, what my friends looked like, what the girl I was in a romantic feud with looked like, what I thought I looked like, the shape of my dreams etc— there is one single image plastered over all of it. It is the 2005 cover of Lula magazine, specifically issue two, currently listed on ebay for £259.29. That cover features a girl with blonde hair, styled to look like Sue Lyon in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita. She is wearing heart shaped glasses and holding a red lollipop to her lips, just like in the film’s promotional poster. 

I don’t remember reading the Nabokov novel before I was in my twenties, but I’m pretty sure the copy I still own was bought around the time of Lula. If any one of us ever did read it then, we couldn’t have done so very deeply or for long, certainly none of us finished it. I think we just liked the way ‘nymph’ sounded; ballet-like, light. 

K, S and I all had heart-shaped glasses identical to the Lula girl’s. We wore them with high-waisted denim shorts and filthy tap dancing shoes. Presumably, the twenty-three year old indie musicians we dated were our Humberts. 

In the map of my imagination there is a ribbon which ties that Lula cover inextricably to; The Virgin Suicides, Kirsten Dunst (a later Lula cover star), heidi plaits, Malboro Lights, ballet pumps, Misha Barton, Chanel Chance, vodka with cranberry juice, Jenny Lewis’ hot pants, collarbones, and the song Float On by Modest Mouse. On the back cover of the magazine (of what I can see from the ebay listing, my memory isn’t that good) is a Hermes ad featuring the model Gemma Ward, who I suppose completes the circle. 

In the pages of Elle Collections (also sold in the Waterstones magazine section and now, like a lot of things from that time, also discontinued) we would pour over images of Gemma Ward, Jessica Stam, Coco Rocha and Irina Lazareanu in the ‘backstage’ feature. We knew all the models by name and would imitate their ‘off-duty’ poses. They put their hands behind their heads like bunny ears a lot. So did we: I still have dozens of polaroids of the three of us doing our bunny ears, in the smoking areas of the pubs and clubs we’d sneak into. For a while, the About Me section of my Facebook profile page was a picture of Jessica Stam. The Would Like to Meet section, a picture of a Marc Jacobs Stam bag. S’s parents even bought her one for her birthday. When I asked my mum if I could have one too she told me where I could shove it. (I cried). 

“I don’t get it?” A boy I wanted to like me once said of our beloved Stam, “She looks like she’s dying.” 

He was right, he didn’t get it. 

In one of the bunny polaroids, S decided that my upper arms didn’t look like the upper arms of a ‘model off-duty’. To rectify this, she very carefully thinned them out with a black sharpie, disappearing the additional skin into the night behind. 

    *******

Of all my cringeworthy teenage incarnations, only this period fills me with shame. The best answer I can come up with as to why—which must be true because I feel dread even typing it—is because I don’t think it ever ended. 

An earlier phase, which involved shoplifted H&M corsets, the chewed sleeves of Korn hoodies, Rotten.com and an inordinate amount of handjobs, fills me with a desperate protectiveness for teenage girls the world over. It is also very funny to me. It has a naivete and an absurdity to it that seems irrevocably relegated to the past. 

There is something naive and absurd about fourteen year old girls dressing like caricatures of a fictional fourteen year old girl which fills me with a desperate protectiveness for teenage girls the world over, too. Only it doesn’t seem relegated to anywhere irretrievable at all. Nor, more pertinently, to fourteen year olds girls. 

The girl of my dreams, Lula, is stalking them. 

On my Instagram feed the Lula cover reimagines itself on a continuous loop, making a mockery of any attempt to outgrow 2005, either emotionally or physically. I am sold white ankle socks with scalloped edges, ballet cardigans, velvet Alice bands and satin bows for my hair, collagen supplements for my skin. The word ‘dewy’ is chanted like a mantra. A dancing woman explains to me, via bullet points that appear about her face, why I have trouble sleeping. She says words like ‘moonface’. The children of famous actors advise me to draw on freckles. 

 I AM THIRTY-FOUR, I want to scream into the void. 

But it’s as though, in some hazy ritual of cranberry juice and polaroid flash a spell was cast, and I’m cursed to be batted over the head with pictures of fallow deer and bows until I submit—forever wedded to the most shallow parts of my personality, formed when I knew myself the least. 

Here, everything is as easy as taking a sharpie to a photograph; revisited, glossed over and perfected. 

Like once you dare commit the sin of dressing-up like a fourteen year old girl, even when you are one, you're condemned never to stop. 

Or perhaps I just need to delete Instagram, and read a magazine instead.