The Old Man of Maesteg

“Then, of course, there’s the man who lived in the mountains.” Your 80-year-old grandmother’s thick South Wales accent bellows, snapping you and your sister to attention. You look at her and can’t help but feel a blend of warmth and fear.

Your sister glances at you with an understated smile that bears the weight of your shared childhood.

“I always believed grandad,” she said, turning to you.

So did you, you thought. Your grandad spent his life talking about nature. He was never one to stray too far into the trees, but you’d often find him feeding the local deer roaming for food or checking in on the nearby sheep whenever your dad brought you to visit.

You decide to indulge your grandma because you love her and her silky, scary voice.

“How does it go, granny?” you ask with genuine care, resigned to the outcome. You love her, after all.

Your grandma points to the mountain visible from her living room window. A flock of sheep rests on hills across the village. The steepest hills you’ve ever seen played House with their mountainous neighbours, cradling this tiny village with valleys as far as the eye can see, while nearby streams and waterfalls hint at how much they’ve seen and how little you know. Thousands of pine trees cover the mountainside, like stubble on a giant’s beard. This giant hasn’t shaved in a long time.

“You kids remember how your grandad used to tell the story.”

Your grandmother hesitates. This is her first time.

You and your sister nod.

“Fi -” she says, hesitating again.

“FEE FI FO FUM”, she bellows.

“I SMELL THE BLOOD OF SOME ENGLISHMEN! BE HE ‘LIVE, OR BE HE DEAD, I’LL GRIND HIS BONES TO MAKE MY BREAD!”

You flinch, expecting two coarse hands to jab your sides and tickle you. Your sister, wearing a cartoonish grin, looks at her twiddling thumbs. The partially ashen wood crackles in the fireplace as your grandmother finishes the fable you heard whenever you visited. At the end of a second, you swear you hear laughter from years gone by, filling the room like a ghost made of joy. You glance at your grandma as she looks back at you and your sister. Her resolve seems to crumble, but your words are only dust. She fiddles with a tissue in her pale hands and gulps for air.

“You know, one Christmas I could’ve sworn I heard Santa’s sleigh bells ringing when we stayed here that one year,” your sister says, covering the silence with a plaster only she knew how to apply.

“I’ll never forget my dream that night”, she continues.

“Santa had jumped out of his sleigh to slide down the mountain, but he didn’t know it was actually the giant’s back.”

“Lucky he wasn’t an Englishman then!” you retort. Everyone in the room laughs. You feel proud. At least you can make your grandma smile.

“You’re not wrong,” your little sister says.

“Anyway, I’m not really sure what happened next, but all I know is that Santa and the giant mountain person became besties. There was a waterfall in there somewhere.”

Caution sits on the end of your laughter as you feel the cold sting of deja vu across your face. I could’ve sworn I had that dream before, your brain says.

Your grandmother rises from her armchair and heads for what was once the dining room, now a hospital-style bed with a wet room behind it. You hear a wooden door creak open around the corner. It’s the cupboard beneath the TV that never worked—the one you’ve never seen open before. She meanders back into the living room, standing by the crackling fireplace with a small, leatherbound book. It looks nothing like the textbooks you’ve been revising for school. The mix of despair and excitement on your grandma’s face is unlike any you’ve seen before. The book is used, not old. The flames reflect two letters on the leather binding: R.K.—your grandad’s initials. Your grandma unwinds the wax string, sniffles, and opens the book.

“Well, kids, I guess now is as good a time as any.”

“For what, granny?” you say, genuinely surprised. The story doesn’t usually go on this long.

“When your father was a little boy, your grandad spent almost every day he could walking up that mountain into the forest. Even if he was knackered from a shift in the mines, he would still head out for a short time. Sometimes he took me, other times he went with your dad, but he always went further on his own.”

This wasn’t anything unusual, you silently think. You knew how much your grandad loved the outdoors, even though you never really saw him venture beyond the big hill your grandparents’ house sat on.

“But one day, he came home from a night shift, dumped his bag in the hallway, and walked up the hill into the trees. He didn’t come back for hours and hours. Usually, I didn’t think anything of it - he often went up there to birdwatch and be in nature, but this time…This time was different. It was gone midnight by the time he came back - I’d called the police, asked the neighbours if they’d seen him at all. I was worried he’d died.”

You lean forward. Your sister does the same.

“And when he got back, he just walked back in, kissed me on the cheek, and put the kettle on. That was it. Like nothing had ever happened. I slapped him! I thought he was dead, and he didn’t seem to notice.”

You laugh because you cannot find the words to fit the moment. In the corner of your eye, you catch your sister’s mouth wide open.

“Before you were both born, your grandad would often float away as if his head lived in those bloody mountains. I mean, I love that he loved nature so much. It was one of the first things we bonded over. But, you see, there were times when I was worried he was forgetting what he had back at the bottom of the hill. Us. Me, your father.”

It’s strange to think about your grandad as anything other than your grandad. Your dad’s dad, wandering the mountains. You feel intrigued by him but confused all the same.

“But, anyway, he put the kettle on. Made himself a tea and pulled this journal out of the cupboard. He picked up a pen and started scribbling.”

“I never knew he was a writer,” your sister says.

“He wasn’t. Not really. I don’t remember ever seeing him journal, but that day changed something in him. After that, he stopped going into the mountains. The forest became a story he would tell. He was content, I think.”

She stops to sit down, realising she’s been standing for a few minutes.

“I pestered him all the bloody time after that. What happened? Where did you go? Why were you gone for so long? But he just said that he doesn’t need to go up there anymore. That was it. My blood was boiling for weeks.”

” I’m not surprised, granny!” you say, happy you can offer up something to your tired grandmother.

Her deep-seated eyes find your gaze. She smiles, ever so slightly.

“Anyway, he eventually told me the answers were in here, so I read it a few weeks ago,” she says, lifting the book. She folds the opening page around the back, revealing what looks like a high-quality drawing of a brown deer. You cup your hand over your chest, where you have a tattoo identical to the drawing. Only your sister, now clasping your knee with a strength you didn’t know she had, is aware of its existence. You look at her, deciding not to reveal your tattoo to anyone else yet. Partly because you know your mother would hate it, but mostly, today isn’t about you. Your grandmother continues, and you don’t protest.

“Today, I learned how I am going to die,” your grandmother says, reading from your grandfather’s journal.

Breath leaves your lungs. The air surrounding you feels heavy, as weeks of watching your grandad slowly fade away smash together and settle around you like the dust in your attic at home.

“WHA-” you and your sister blurt out.

“The breeze pulled me up the hill,” your grandma continues, unfazed by her two bemused grandchildren.

“So, I went. I walked, and I walked, up the steepest hill in the world. I walked up the cobbled path, through the forest of thousand-foot-tall trees, and into the moon’s wake. I found myself staring at the river below, the one that ran through the valleys on the far side of the mountain - the one you can’t see from the house. There were no clouds. I stood on the ledge. Santa’s Grotto, this viewpoint was called. I don’t know why. Perhaps this is where the Welsh elves lived.”

You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. You want to do both.

“As I looked into the meandering valley, I heard several blasts of water below me, like that jet bath thing Janice from down the street has. Anyway, the water crystallised in the cold air, forming a ladder. Naturally, I went down it.”

Naturally, you think to yourself. You begin to doubt if you ever knew your grandad at all. You tell yourself that you would go down the ladder.

“That led me into a cave of sheer rock and grassy hills greener than I had ever seen before. Water slid down the smooth rock and dripped onto the floor. Each droplet was iridescent, as if it were a path guiding the way. And so, I let it guide me.”

You notice that your grandma is surprisingly calm. She’s read this numerous times before.

“I’d lost track of time at this point. I knew Kath would be mad, but not as mad as my stomach. It roared at me. But the same force that pulled me up that mountain and down the ladder made of water was palpable in this cave. I could taste it. So, I walked further down. As I did, the echoes of my footsteps got quieter, and the walls started getting larger until it felt like I was in the heart of the mountain itself. The cave’s end stretched into the distance, far beyond anything I could see. Then, boom. A kaleidoscopic whirlpool erupted in front of me, projecting onto the smooth rock all around, water dripping from the walls. Then, I watched as my entire life played out before me. I saw my mum, my dad, and my school friends at the age I met them. I even saw a deer resting on my belly when I was a kid. I always wanted to run around like those guys. Beautiful creatures.”

You swear you feel your tattoo pulsating in your skin.

“Anyway. I also saw myself in a hospital lobby waiting to hear if I was going to be a grandparent. I reached out and brushed my grandchildren’s cheeks as they paused from playfighting each other.”

You cup your right cheek in your hand.

“And then, deeper into the cave, I saw a man dressed in a white coat tell my wife that the disease had spread, and that her husband was going to die very soon. It was then that the mountain itself spoke to me. It told me that, if I wanted to, I could leave my life behind, but there was a catch, apparently. I couldn’t return. I could never come back. I could never walk up and over Maesteg’s hills again. The pull of the mountain I’d felt all my life had led me to this moment, I’m sure of it. And I’ve got to be honest, I almost gave in. But -”

Your grandma’s voice cracks, trailing in the weight of heartbreak.

“I liked the life that I saw. Death can get me when I’m ready. Signed, R.K.”

As your grandma finishes reading, the room sits in stunned silence. Before you can decide if you believe the story, or if you want to, you find yourself thinking about whether anyone else had been to this cave before. What if they didn’t like what they saw? Did they die? Were there more caves like this? Is that what grandad meant all those years ago? You can’t decide. You don’t want to decide. And so, you entertain your grandmother in her grief and walk with her, arm in arm, to her husband’s funeral.

That evening, after you’ve taken off your crumpled black suit and got into bed, you find yourself drifting in and out of sleep, unable to rest. During the service, you kept your eyes glued to your grandad’s coffin; your unflinching gaze begged him for answers he couldn’t provide. You wondered what happened to him when he died. You wanted to know where he went and if his story meant he wasn’t at peace. You felt him drifting in the cosmos like a breath on the wind.

What felt like moments later, you see a flicker of iridescence through the curtain. Curious, you think. You open a crack in the curtain and see your grandma, in her dressing gown, feeding a chestnut-brown deer, clad in white spots. You look down at the tattoo on your stomach and touch it; the cold skin of your fingers raises a legion of goosebumps on your body. The tattoo feels warm. Then, you look back out the window. The deer is gone, and so is your grandmother.