Boho arrows, feathers and hamsa hand design set

The driver was a woman called Maud Okonedo who had driven that route for twenty-two years and never once looked out the side window. The thing about the A14 at dusk is that the light comes sideways off the reservoir and throws every arrow on every road sign into a long gold shadow, so you start to believe the road is pointing somewhere. Maud believed it. She followed the arrows. Chevron after chevron, past the services, past the shut-down Little Chef, until the tarmac turned to sand in her head and she was driving under a sky the colour of a tin plate.

She came to a crossroads with a single signpost. No words on it. Just a grey triangle pointing right, and a hand painted beside it, open palm, with an eye sat in the middle like a fried egg that had seen things. Maud laughed, because it was the daftest thing she had ever seen, and she turned right because the eye seemed to want her to.

Four miles on, the lorry stopped. Dead, as dead as a doorknob. She got out and found the feathers. Grey ones, black ones, gold ones, pinned along the verge like someone had been quietly keeping a record. And there, at the bottom of the ditch, one straight arrow pointing back the way she came. Home, the arrow said. Or it would have, if she could read arrows, which apparently she could not.

So she walked. And that, my love, is why there's a lorry full of foil stickers rusting in a layby near Corby, and why Maud Okonedo now runs the crossroads café with a hand on the sign and a very strict policy on sunglasses.