It rang four or five times before she answered

Hi Gloria, its Luke, how are you?

There was silence for a second, a hesitant, panic stricken moment as she tried to remember who the voice belonged to then relief,

Luke, Luke Kite, is that you? It's so good to hear your voice. I was going to call you.

I could picture her easily, at the other end of the phone, although I hadn't seen either of them for over a year. The tiny frame and long dark hair; the receiver would look huge as she held it awkwardly to her ear with both hands.

She's got this weird habit of closing her eyes when she's on the phone and smiling to herself, like she's drifted off into some beautiful dream. But I knew that day she wasn't smiling. She sounded worried, scared in fact.

Mark's gone, she said.

Apparently, he came home one afternoon in early October and announced, without warning, that he'd quit at the hospital. She naturally asked why and he said that he'd been thinking about it for a while and now was the right time. He wanted to concentrate on his painting.

For two months after that, all he did was sit around the apartment. He listened to music, read and prayed a lot. Gloria said he'd started with the notebooks again too. Writing pages and pages that she never got to see.

Nobody ever gets to see I told her. In Junior High, a boy called John Winston had stolen one of the notebooks and started reading it out to the class. It was called 'The Jesus Notebook' and contained detailed records of all Mark's 'conversations' with God. Everybody was laughing, it really wasn't cool to be a Jesus Freak and Winston was giving a performance Charlton Heston would've been proud of. Even I laughed although I felt pretty bad about it later.

Mark finally managed to grab the book back and ran out of class. When Mr McDonald came back in I told him Mark was sick and had gone to see the nurse.

After that, he kept writing in his little books, maybe even more than before but nobody ever got to see what was in there.

On the day his family arrived in Decatur, I watched them move in across the street. The kid looked about my age and seemed pretty bookish or should I say nerdy, which was the more commonly used term. He did have a mop of thick brown hair though and when I saw him carry a guitar into the house, it was time for an introduction.

His name was Mark mine is Luke, it never occurred to us at the time, but everyone in Decatur seemed to have a biblical name. We formed a band with Mat and Peter, my sister Elisabeth occasionally banged a tambourine and sang some backing vocals.

On that first day, Mark saw me looking at the guitar and said his Dad was teaching him to play. Then he asked 'Do you like The Beatles?' I was nuts about The Beatles and they were the basis of our friendship for fifteen years.

After months of pestering, my parents finally bought me a guitar for Christmas that year. Mat had a little set of drums and Pete an old double bass.

We called ourselves The Mops, then The Revolvers. We grew our hair and got into a lot of trouble for it, at home and school but the common enemy just pushed us closer together. Everyone else at school thought we were weird, always talking about music and books. Sgt Pepper, Pet Sounds, Catcher in the Rye and On The Road, the men responsible for these works of genius became our gurus. They were the only people who made any sense; everyone else was a phoney. We spent every minute together and when we weren't huddled in a corner of the library or at band practice, we wrote letters to each other. I signed mine as George Harrison, Mat, of course, was Ringo, Pete was Paul and Mark was always John.

Remember, this was the '60s.  These authors and musicians offered a seemingly ideal alternative to the lifestyle of our parents. In our pure, perfect naivety, we really believed in all this and even now I feel; ashamed almost, that we weren't braver and didn't do more to make it happen. Getting older isn't an excuse. We didn't grow out of it; we just gradually gave up trying when it became too difficult. It's easier to abandon your dreams when everyone else has already given up on theirs.

We had constructed a perfect world around ourselves and the band. All it needed to become a reality was the utter faith of all those involved. Mark and I were always the driving force because we wrote the songs. There would be no need to find a job in the store or the plant or the office. Why work for The Man, when we could play, making music to change the world. But I remember, first around 1969 or 70, just after The White Album, realising that it was never going to happen for us.

Even in the most confident days of longhaired teenage rebellion, our parents could still drag us along to church most Sundays. It was a ritual, a little concession that kept Mum and Dad happy and if we crossed our fingers it didn't count. But it was never like that for Mark. He was a pretty intense kid and he took religion, like everything else, seriously. At that age, he was reading The Bible and Salinger, Miller, Melville and Milton. During the summer of 1966, he bought a copy of Datebook because there was a picture of Paul McCartney on the front. The article inside included a quote of John Lennon's, the quote:

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

I can still remember it word-for-word and I still have my copy of the magazine. It was a straightforward, pretty accurate assessment of how I and a lot of kids felt but the Church, of course, and Mark had a real problem with it. He didn't burn his Beatles records but he was upset and angry. His parents argued a lot and suddenly the only two dependable influences in his life were at war too.

I think, after all that's happened, that day was a turning point. Looking back, he had to make a choice and never really thought of Lennon the same way after that.

He would still listen to the music and read every magazine with a Beatles article in it, but it became more like surveillance than the hero worship it had been.

By the 70's, he'd outgrown the band and wanted to move on to other things, getting more involved with the church. He'd ask us to come along but it really wasn't our scene. By that time, I was already pretty much beyond redemption anyway and couldn't wait to get off to college.

I ended up going to Athens to study electrical engineering. Years of tinkering with amps and guitars had paid off after all. The night before I left, Mark came over. He was leaving too, to go work with the YMCA.

He handed me a prayer book, inside the cover he'd written:

And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

I think it was a last ditch attempt on his part to save me from a sinful life of alcohol, drugs and casual sex but those were my main reasons for going.

Please Luke, I'm serious. I know you're a good person but you've been confused by evil, its not too late to turn to God.

I grabbed my copy of 'Catcher' and scribbled:

Whatever gets you through the night

I handed it to him and he shook his head I will save your soul, Luke Kite, whether you want me to or not.

For the next couple of years, we hardly saw each other, keeping in touch mostly by mail. I was having too good a time on campus and didn't visit home much. Mark volunteered for a project in Beirut and spent some time out there helping civilians caught up in the fighting. Then, in '77, after his folks divorced, he moved over to Honolulu with his mother. He found a job and met Gloria Abe. I was Best Man at the wedding and Mark was happier and more relaxed than I'd ever seen him. He still played guitar and had started painting; Miss Abe was definitely doing something right.

Then, a year and a half later she was telling me he was gone. He'd got a call from the YMCA, about a conference being held in London to discuss the crisis between Syria and Jordan. It looked like there was going to be another war and because of Mark's experience in Beirut, they wanted him to attend. To start with, Gloria had been relieved. It was something for him to focus on and force him back out into the world. He was packed and ready to go but when she got home a couple of nights later, the suitcase and passport were still there but Mark was gone. All he'd taken, as far as she could tell, were his cassette recorder and a bunch of tapes. That was two days ago and she hoped that maybe he was with me in New York.

I hadn't seen him and it certainly wasn't the sort of thing Mark would usually do but I told her not to worry, he'd be home soon. I was due over in the Islands for a couple of days the following week. The station was filming a piece on Christmas Hawaiian style so I'd see them both then and everything would be fine.

After dinner that night, I went out for a walk, thinking about Decatur and the band. I turned onto Central Park West and as I approached the Dakota there was a guy hanging around outside. The way he stood or something about him, beneath the street lights, really reminded me, right there, of Mark. A Limousine pulled up and two figures got out, I recognised them too. As they started to walk up the steps to the front door the other guy followed. He shouted something then there was a flash and a crack, I realised he had a gun. The shots rang out four or five times.