Typography & design by
Richard Wolfströme

Exhibition and installation
by Standard 8

Website
Words William Shaw
Design Richard Wolfströme
Photography Kenny Laurenson

Publishing consultant Adrian Driscoll

An Unmadeup Production

...all she wanted to do was sit down on the cold pavement and cry

On the pavement, just outside Brighton Station

Kristina was tired. She was broke. She hadn’t eaten in a day. The final straw was someone stealing her purse.

A student at BHASVIC college, it hadn’t been Kristina’s favourite year. Financially the situation at home was not good. She was having to pay for college herself, catching the bus after college every day to the Marina to work in McDonald’s which felt practically like indentured servitude. Always tired, usually hungry; the eighteen-hour days were killing her.

She’d left the purse on a table in a classroom. When she’d come back it had gone. What was worse than the money was that it had her bus pass in it. It was going to cost a fortune to replace it, but right now she was supposed to be going to McDonald’s. Desperate, she called her dad, 50 minutes away in Seaford.

He’d risk the evening traffic to drive over to pick her up from outside the station.

Approaching the station, she noticed the girl selling the Big Issue. She was dressed in a bright green jumper, covered in coloured badges, this big smile on her face under her short brown frizzy hair – despite the fact it was absolutely freezing. "Big Issue?"

Kristina felt the tears about to start. The world seemed so against her; there was a big knot of misery inside her. Exhausted, starving, all she wanted to do was sit down on the cold pavement and cry.

The magazine seller asked, "What’s wrong?"

Kristina blurted it all out; the stolen purse, her job at McDonald’s, her father, stuck in traffic.

The girl smiled. "Don’t worry. If your dad can’t make it, I’ll lend you the money."

That’s all it took, right there. That perfect moment; that small miracle. A homeless woman offering her the money she’d worked so hard to earn. Suddenly all that pent up tension and misery were gone. Everything had changed.

Kristina goes back past the station hoping to see her again, to thank her, to tell her how much she meant to her that day. She has never seen her again.