Mary and Paul Henderson spend roughly fourteen dollars a week on bottled water, delivered in cartons of twelve to their house two streets back from the Stony Creek trail in Seddon, a habit they maintained without really examining it until Paul, checking the water tank gauge during a routine gutter clean in August, discovered their own rainwater tank was, and had been for some time, completely full.
"It just fell on the roof," Paul said, looking between the tank and a carton of water with a mountain range printed on the side, despite the nearest mountain range being several hundred kilometres away. "It fell on our roof, went down the pipe, sat in the tank, and we drove past it to buy more water that also, somewhere, fell on a roof."
The Hendersons' habit is, in one sense, a very old story. Bottled water's rise in countries where tap water is safe to drink owes a great deal to marketing rather than necessity, and one of its clearest chapters was written by an actor better known for radio drama than refreshment. In 1977, after Perrier developed a plan to enter the American market, the company hired Orson Welles to voice its television commercials, describing the water in a 1979 spot as "naturally sparkling, from the centre of the earth" before closing, simply, on the brand name. Perrier also cut the price of its bottle nearly in half around the same period, pricing the product, as one account of the campaign put it, as "simultaneously aspirational and accessible," a balance the Hendersons appear to have independently rediscovered with a twelve-pack from the supermarket on Victoria Street.
Mary maintains that the household's preference is "about taste, not snobbery," a position complicated somewhat by the fact that neither Henderson can reliably tell their bottled water apart from tap water in blind conditions, a test Paul proposed and then quietly abandoned after losing four rounds in a row.
They have not cancelled the delivery. Paul has, however, started referring to the rainwater tank as "the free one" in a tone his wife describes as "needlessly pointed," and has taken to checking its level weekly, the way other people check a share portfolio, for reasons he cannot fully articulate beyond a general sense that somewhere, seventy kilometres away, a bottling plant is still winning.