~~~

Abjection is above all ambiguity

Ambiguity is an alcove

Our Alcove is cosy

Filtered, safe

Joanna’s head stayed fixed in position, eyes on the graffiti outside the blue door that allegedly led to the hostel she’d just booked back in the car, half an hour earlier.

Abjection is above all ambiguity

Ambiguity is an alcove

The words seemed familiar somehow, philosophy that Yute Long had told her once, or perhaps the Gum Yong translator at Uni, or a book at the library

but de-territorialised

scrawled out on Lisboan infrastructure, regular structure, pastel façade

in English over Portuguese

next to an amateur spray of a giant dick shooting up like a rocket into an upside down blood pool.

Why?

For her?

There was a noise to her left, a local woman shouting at her friend, pinching her jacket as evidence.

Joanna waited for them to pass, then put a hand out and pressed the hostel buzzer.

~~~

The hostel owner was playing a football game on a huge projection screen when she walked in, and two men who she could hear whispering German were parked on the couch at the side.

‘Take over,’ the hostel owner said, handing the control to the German with frizzy hair, then got up and strolled over to the table that had to be the check-in desk.

Didn’t look much like it.

No leaflets or guides to local tourist sites.

Just a carboard cut-out pic of Faye Valentine, leaning over the CB cockpit controls.

‘Chinese? Korean?’ the hostel owner asked, taking her passport and writing her details down in a shabby-looking notebook.

She pointed at the passport cover.

‘Ah, Hong Kong…quite close. You coming in from Porto? Or flying in?’

Joanna looked at the two Germans in the relaxation area, one of them playing the football game, the other holding an anime doll she didn’t recognise level with his face, interrogating it.

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