The Hair

"For gods sake Anna, are you cleaning in there or just messing around?! I don't want to have to ask again!"

My mum has just started chewing me out about not cleaning the bath. It's become a frequent argument in this house, almost every single day there comes a shout from down the hall. 'Clean the bath' or 'why don't you wipe down after yourself?'; it's become part of the morning ritual.
The thing is, I always wipe down after a shower. I stand in the bathroom bundled in a towel; turn off the the shower and grab a new towel from the rack, to start the aggravating process of wiping away all of the water droplets from the ceramic tiles. It takes even longer these days as we had a new bath and shower fitted. Instead of a plastic shower curtain, we now have a big glass door hanging from the wall. I wipe it clean, and dry, every day so that there are no water marks or gross smears left behind.
Then, the damp towel gets hung up to dry. Simple enough. After this morning, after what I've seen, I'll never clean that room again. Hell, I'll never use this bath for as long as I live.

I suppose I should take a step back, and start from the beginning. A handful of months ago, our landlord paid us a visit to check out the place. He is a fairly absent guy, but he makes a habit of stopping over once a year to make sure his property is still standing. He lets us know when he is coming over and all in all he is a pretty decent landlord. We pay our rent, he sorts out any issues we have and that's pretty much it. We've lived here eight years now, and it's a pretty nice setup for me and my mum. Our house has been standing for 60 years, but it's in good shape.
Before all my problems started; we had noticed that our bath had been looking pretty dull, the enamel was worn and chipped. Our shower sputtered and the plastic coating was faded. Some of the white tiles on the wall were loose or cracked. I guess the bathroom tiles were pretty old at the time anyway, I mean, the cracks had been there since we moved in. Generally, you looked at the bathroom and just thought that it needed a nice coat of paint and some TLC.
So when the landlord announced his annual visit, my mum made a plan to ask about getting a new shower and a can of paint. She didn't want to push her luck, so she was going to offer to do the painting herself. That's the kind of person that my mum is. We were both totally shocked when the landlord announced his plans to get a whole new bathroom refurbishment for us, a new bath, new tiles, new shower... Hell, he even said we could choose the colour scheme.

Fast forward two months later, the workman are all gone and we have this awesome, shiny new bathroom. My mum picked out this beautiful Aqua colour scheme, white tiles and a crisp white sink unit. The first time I used the shower, I felt like I was in a 5 star hotel. The water came out with no false starts, no ridiculous temperature issues and best of all, there was a working extractor fan! I was pleased to finally not have to deal with damp towels. It was nice to have a new bath too, it was shiny and new. With big clawed feet, like I'd seen in posh magazines. I thought at the time that it was an odd choice, as I thought that would have been an expensive option. But what did I know about baths?
For a few days, everything was perfect. Until my mum started yelling at me, "you're leaving hair in the bath!". At first, I simply thought that I was being forgetful. I'd walk back along the hall, pick up a towel and wipe down the bath. I'd polish the silver taps, clean the smears from the glass and pick out the odd strands of hair laying the the base of the bath.

I assumed that the hair was mine, as it was long and black. Just like my hair was, and my mums. So I mean, it could have been her not bothering to clean up after herself. After a few more days, that's what I began to think. I was certain that I'd already cleaned up. I was 100% certain of it. I'd wiped this surface, I'd cleaned that wall. Where was this water coming from? Why was there so much damn hair I'm this bath all the time?

After a couple more days, things took a turn for the worse. The long black hairs started to multiply, once there was a hair or two at a time. Then 3, then 4 and sooner than I realised, I'd be finding small knots of hair. Wet, slimy hair. It honestly looked more like it was from a dirty lake, than from my clean bath. I didn't know what to do! My mum never seemed to see it, and it couldn't be from anywhere else. So I ended up just doggedly cleaning it up, time after time. Before long I'd be trying to pick up clumps of hair, stringy back webs of hair.