My bathroom has become a science project.
It is at least partly my fault. I have been rather slovenly in my domestic habits over the past few months, and haven't given the bathroom floor a proper mopping in ages.
But there are certain Chinese factors at play here too. It's a Chinese bathroom, so it only has one drain - a rather small one that very easily becomes blocked. And the water doesn't drain towards it anyway (oh, no, of course not - this is China!). There's a particularly ugly tendency for water to pool under the wash-hand basin, something that's become worse recently because of a small leak that's developed around the joint of one of the inlet pipes down there.
I used to rely on the force of the shower spray to rinse most of the water away, but..... my shower-head has been getting feebler and feebler of late, clogged with the silt that flows through the water-pipes of my building. (No kidding. Most Beijing taps are fitted with filters of coarse wire mesh just inside the nozzle to sift this stuff out. There's usually one in the hoses, too, that attach to your washing-machine or your shower-head. I took them all out, because they were getting completely blocked every month or two, and it was such a pain-in-the-arse to keep removing and cleaning them. I don't know if the pipes in my building are particularly bad, but there's almost always a noticeable sediment in the bottom of a bucket or a washbowl that I fill from my taps. And sometimes the water is actually visibly discoloured, usually a reddish brown as if tainted with blood or rust. Most off-putting!)
The silt, you see, I'm sure that's the problem. I haven't been rinsing it away as thoroughly while I shower; the unsuspected under-the-sink leak has perhaps shifted the patterns of water circulation around the tiled floor; and no, I know, I haven't used the mop for far too long. Little by little, insidious, unnoticed - like the slowly rising water temperature of frog-boiler Gramsci - this bloody silt has been building up into mini sand dunes in the nooks and corners of my bathroom floor.
And it harbours life.
At first, I didn't pay much attention to the little flies that were sometimes manifesting themselves in my bathroom. I quite often get a few small insects appearing in the apartment, and I assume they've just flown in from outside.
It was odd, though, that they were always in the bathroom. They seemed to be flying up out of the drains in the sink or the floor. I tried sloshing some bleach down, in case there was somehow a little colony of the critters down there.
Still the flies appeared, in ever greater numbers. One day last week when I counted over thirty of them, I began to get a mite concerned about it. Usually I am a bit of a krypto-Buddhist, and try to refrain from killing living creatures without a very good reason. However, the infestation was reaching alarming proportions now, and was, I felt, starting to constitute a good reason. I began swatting the little bastards. Tiny black smears on the tiled walls remind me of the casualties in this private war. I must have dispatched at least 50 of them now, but more keep coming back.
And then there are the writhy things. I'd been noticing these for a while, but had thought they were just strands of hair or bits of dirt or minute sandbars of silt wriggling about in the current of water flowing over them. No. When I took a really close look, I discovered that they were alive. I'm not sure if they are some larval form of the pesky little flies. They look more like some kind of tiny worm or leech to me. Yick!
Hand-to-hand combat isn't going to work with these little bastards. We need to bring on the WMDs. Yes, I hate to escalate in this way, but I fear I really have no choice: we're going chemical. Trouble is, they seem to be remarkably resilient to bleach. I've been raining salt on them instead. Very effective in individual cases, but I don't think it's a complete solution. I think I need to hose down the whole room with something very toxic.
Thank heavens this grisly menagerie seems content to occupy my bathroom, and hasn't yet attempted to annex the rest of the apartment.
I am quite sure that these strange life-forms must have hatched from eggs in the silt that pours out of the taps. (I have already heard of two other Beijingers who've been having similar problems - the flies, at least, if not the leeches - so it's not just karmic payback for my negligent hygiene practices.)
So.... the next time you hear someone in Beijing bragging that they drink the tapwater.... you might want to mention this cautionary little tale to them.
Right. Now it's time to go shopping for some pest-control products.
"Of course, you realise this means WAR?"
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