"I remember distinctly the day I began to feel dissatisfied with my work," Nengi said. He was staring at the ceiling, while playing with her hair. "I'd come back from a meeting in New York and when I got into my flat I felt so empty. Maybe it was the work; I'd been in meetings constantly every day for the previous two weeks. I remember feeling, for the first time, that the work I did was meaningless and that the life which until then had meant so much to me - the fantastic hotels, the meetings where sometimes there were people from ten different nationalities, the best and brightest in the world, I remember feeling that that life was artificial and pointless. It was a strange feeling. When I started at MLK I'd dashed off e-mails to my friends and family describing every single person I worked with, describing every meeting in detail. I was in a tough group, dealing with emerging markets that sometimes tended to be erratic, but that only made the work more exciting. I had settled in very quickly, I didn't have any choice anyway: in MLK you hit the ground running. Within six months I'd been to Latin America for the first time in my life and had in one single week had meetings in Prague, New York and Rio. I didn't see how I, or anyone else, could ask for more. So when I began to feel dissatisfied, it amazed me. And the feeling didn't go away. It made me think about every aspect of my work and the life I led, searching for what was wrong, searching for what else I could possibly want. That was when I began to think of promoting infrastructure investments here at home and the idea gave me a lot of energy. If I could manage to have even one project financed here, that would finally give meaning to all the fancy knowledge I had acquired. The political situation in Nigeria was terrible then so I would've been crazy to suggest to my people that we should do anything here, but it didn't deter me. I began to do my research, to assemble the stuff I would need. I was convinced that things would improve someday. The day Abacha died, I danced naked in my living room. I know I should have been sad for the lives he'd destroyed and what he'd done to our country and also for the way whatever it was that drove him had turned him into such a monster, but I had no time for any of that. I sensed that the time had come to try and realise my plans, I sensed it and I couldn't control myself."

Moments like those would become some of Ruth's most precious memories. She would store every detail in her mind - his tone of voice, how he'd held her, how his leg had felt across her body, how his body had trembled each time her fingers slightly touched his nipple - she would store every detail carefully like a farmer preparing for a lean season. When he was in some distant corner of the world negotiating great transactions, she would draw from her stores slowly. She would fill her days with memories of him, his big, hard chest, his strong thighs. While these memories often made her smile, they also made her restless and miserable. Most of his work was in Latin America and eastern Europe; Nigeria was, for his employers, a side show, a place they were "looking at for a while" so his trips to Lagos were short, few and far between. Ruth suffered terribly, but she hid her suffering well. All her friends crowed about how lucky she was to have Nengi. And all the time she continued to be tormented by thoughts about Ishaya, that during his monthly visits, he would somehow find out she had been seeing someone else.

To all the things she already found so attractive about Nengi, she added the fact that after their lovemaking, he told her the deepest things about himself. He told her about growing up in Port Harcourt, about studying for a masters in Switzerland, where during his first winter, he thought the cold would drive him mad. She learnt so much about his work that after a short while she no longer felt quite as ignorant about those fantastic deals he and his colleagues put together. She felt extremely privileged; those long post-coital monologues (for she said hardly anything about herself no matter how hard he tried to draw her out) were for her strong evidence that when he said he liked her very much, that she was even more important to him than his great transactions, he wasn't only trying to make her feel good. He had to care about her to tell her all those things, he had to think of her as more than someone he slept with whenever he happened to be in Lagos; she had to mean a lot more to him than that. Though from time to time he mentioned this or that former girlfriend, he never said anything about a current relationship. Ruth thought it would be silly to imagine that such a lovely man was unattached, and she assumed that there was someone in London whom he chose not to say anything about. She wasn't the probing type, she was grateful for what she was getting, which, even though she saw so little of him, she thought was a lot, and she never asked him if he was in a relationship with someone else.

She sometimes had nightmares that he had gone away and she would never see him again, and she woke up panicky and miserable. One day he would go away for good, of that she was sure, but it was unbearable to think of life after that. She told herself it would be far too ambitious to have long term thoughts about him, but hope is a sly, stubborn thing. In her case the hope that Nengi's departure would somehow not happen never really showed itself, but it was nonetheless alive. It lived a secret half-life, like something concealed at the bottom of a packed deep freezer.

It was at the Sheraton, on the same executive floor where he always stayed, that Nengi broke the news to her that the day she had dreaded had arrived, the day he would have to give up on Nigeria. He'd spent nearly two years trying to get senior government people to listen to him. After several hours in a variety of congested waiting rooms in Abuja, surrounded by the former girlfriends, former schoolmates, distant relatives and party colleagues of the powerful people whom he wanted to see, by contractors, commission agents and all manner of hustlers, all waiting patiently, all demeaning themselves to secretaries, messengers and police orderlies in order to get a chance to see oga or madam, he had been on the verge of accepting defeat. Then through an old friend of his father's Nengi secured a firm appointment to see one of the most powerful ministers in the government. He'd flown in from London the Friday before, spent Saturday with Ruth in Lagos and left for Abuja on Sunday afternoon, nervously hopeful, armed with a refurbished PowerPoint presentation. He'd returned the next Tuesday a broken man.

"I waited for only three hours this time," Nengi said. "The secretary had my name at the top of a list and even told me that the minister had asked her to apologise that he'd received an urgent summons to the president's office, "the Villa" as they all call it up there in Abuja. I couldn't believe that she had actually apologised to me, when I'd sometimes sat in that office from morning till evening and she'd not even looked in my direction. When he came back there was the usual commotion that surrounds power in this bloody country, nearly everyone in the crowd in the waiting room rushed forward to greet him. It was as if they all wanted to lie on the filthy red carpet so that he would step on their heads as he walked past. He and his entourage of about ten people spent nearly half an hour answering greetings and dispensing jokes and so on and so forth and then I was called into his office. It was an enormous office but there were so many people - the entourage and some of those who were with me in the waiting room who'd managed to get in - that it felt very tiny. The waiting section of the office was packed, some were leaning against the wall, a couple were sprawled on the floor. The minister was sitting behind his desk, a huge black desk, and he wore a long black gown and glasses with a dark brown tint. The effect was disconcerting; all through the period I was in the office I searched for his eyes, and was never quite sure where they were at any time. 'Thank you for agreeing to see me, sir,' I said. 'I realise you're very busy.' 'Ah, no problem at all,' he said very pleasantly, 'your uncle is a good friend of mine - and a friend of the party.' One of the men in his entourage, a big fellow in a tight dark suit who was leaning on the wall behind the minister, repeated, 'Yes, a friend of the party.' I looked around me. It was weird; all those people were staring at me, listening to every word. 'I would like to discuss some of the services my bank can render with you, sir,' I said. 'Yes, go ahead, please go ahead, and you have to be quick, we have a party caucus meeting this afternoon.' 'Yes, you have to be quick, we are going for a caucus meeting by one,' the man in the tight suit said. 'I have a slide presentation,' I said and pointed to my bag. 'What is that?' 'A slide what?' I said, 'I have a presentation, a Powerpoint presentation, slides to introduce what we do and then we can discuss areas where we can perhaps . . .' 'I don't think we have time for that,' the dark suit said. 'Yes, we don't have time.' This time it was the minister who echoed him, 'In fact, put it in writing and submit to my secretary.' 'Yes,' the dark suit shouted, with a smile, as if it was the most wonderful thing he'd ever heard in his lousy life, 'yes, put it in writing and submit to the secretary, we don't have time.' 'We're out of time.' 'Put it in writing and submit to the secretary,' another member of the entourage said from behind me. 'Put it in writing,' I heard from at least four other parts of the room. 'Sir, I think there's value . . .' 'Put it in writing,' the man in the dark suit snarled at me, he moved forward as if he would hit me. 'Sir . . .' I began but the minister had turned away, his phone stuck in his ear.

"In the minister's waiting room, just behind the secretary's desk, there is a very large and tall shelf filled to the brim with old files and papers. The files are so many that some are strewn on the floor behind the secretary; some papers marked "secret" actually lie around under her table. When the minister and his hangers-on began to chorus "put it in writing" my mind went straight to that shelf. I knew that was where whatever I wrote would end up.

"I know that what I want to do can be done, I have no doubt about that. But either I'm not going about it the right way or this is not the time. Whatever the case, I can't justify flying to Nigeria nearly every month and having nothing to show for it. I know I already look silly at work. I've known for a while now that the only reason I've kept making the trips is because of you, Ruth, to be with you. But I can no longer justify it. I'm going to miss you and I will call you every opportunity I get and whenever I can I will come and see you and please Ruth promise me you'll finally get e-mail. I'm going to miss you horribly."

He looked desolate; she was sitting beside him on the bed and he took her hands in his and squeezed until her hands began to hurt. His eyes pleaded with her, but she didn't understand the plea in them. What she had felt was a thud on the head as if she'd fallen from a great height followed by a brutal wakefulness. The world was suddenly extremely clear and bright until her tears drenched it. Nengi tried to soothe her but was himself incapacitated. For a short while, she had wild thoughts - perhaps she could move to London to be near him. She would not interfere with his life; he would only come and see her now and again. She would be content to receive whatever little part of him he could spare. She would be out of sight, would not depend on him, would find something to do to feed herself. But she didn't utter any of those desperate thoughts. She knew there was nothing that could be done.

The period between four p.m. and seven p.m. is Ruth's most vulnerable time of day. It is the time she spends alone in her tiny office at Ginger, after the lunch crowd had gone and the customers who came in after work to have a few beers had not yet begun to trickle in. She would sit behind her desk, her chair turned to face the window, and stare at Allen Avenue, at the smoking yellow buses chasing pedestrians off the sidewalks, squeezing themselves into every little space, so desperate they seemed ready to climb the electric poles by the side of the road.

It is during that period that Ruth is most defenceless. That is the time when Nengi's smooth handsome face comes back, his broad chest and the way he shivered when her fingers drew lines around her nipples. Two years after the day he told her in his stale-smelling room on the executive floor at the Sheraton, on a bed with a faded cover, that he could no longer continue visiting Nigeria chasing project finance deals that were going nowhere, her memories of him are as strong as ever. He had called every week at first, his voice laden with guilt, but she had responded to everything he said in monosyllables. He had pleaded with her to get an e-mail account, even taken out one for her with Yahoo, but she'd ignored him. He had written her a long letter, the first letter he'd write in a long time he said, telling her that he thought about her all the time and that he missed her sorely. She had not replied. He had called her the next time he was coming to Nigeria on vacation and said he wanted to stop for a day in Lagos and she'd said, coldly, "There's no need for that."

She'd wanted to return as quickly as possible to the predictable, convenient life she had before Professor found Nengi sitting alone in a corner of Ginger, but that life was gone for good. She couldn't get Nengi out of her head despite everything she'd done to keep him out of her life. Ishaya visited once a month as usual but nothing he did could fill the void that Nengi had left. Ruth is grateful she has Ishaya, but the old, deep contentment she thought she had was gone. She sometimes thinks she ought to be very bitter about what Nengi had done to her, she sometimes thinks she should hate him for turning her life upside down. But occasionally on some evenings when she thinks about him, alone in her office, drawing from those memories she had saved like a farmer preparing for a lean season, she catches herself smiling.